How Novels Work

by John Mullan

Overview

Drawing on his popular weekly column in The Guardian, John Mullan sets out to answer these questions, opening our eyes to the writer's craft, and helping us to appreciate and enjoy novels more fully. Prize-winners and reading group favourites of recent years are set alongside the classics: Monica Ali, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith rub shoulders with Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen and the Brontes, Raymond Chandler, and Virginia Woolf. Through pointed comparisons of their designs and devices, Mullan makes visible the techniques and effects of which we are often only half aware as we read. How Novels Work makes literary criticism something that all fiction enthusiasts can do.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191622922
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	02/14/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He is the author of Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: An Anthology. A broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, he writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the Guardian.

Table of Contents

References     ix
Introduction     1
Beginning     9
Narrating     40
People     79
Genre     105
Voices     127
Structure     155
Detail     189
Style     213
Devices     251
Literariness     284
Ending     303
Notes     321
Select Bibliography     327
Index     337

Editorial Reviews

Review from previous edition
"Expanding on his popular Guardian column, and focusing on a set of key novels, How Novels Work [mullan] aims to explain to the interested 'non-academic' reader critical approaches, particularly 'matters of form', which are normally considered the perserve of academia...the text is rich in critical and literary-historical insights...critical readings which...[are], above all, communicated in plain English."—Beth Lynch, Times Literary Supplement

"Ever insightful critiques...wholly satisfying, and a great education for book-lovers and would-be novelists alike... Mullan is willing to go where other academics do not usually deign to tread."—Susan Elderkin, The Financial Times

"A wealth of sharp mini-essays."—The Guardian

From the Publisher