– his beautiful close studies of dozens of passages, spotting how the world of the novel is sprung into life through techniques simple and elaborate. – his identification of the opponents of realism (or rather what he calls ‘novelism’), and how they unfairly caricature, for example, the Victorian novel – so that post-modernism’s snobbish dismissal of the realist novel fails to acknowledge that both modernist and post-modernist strategies emerge directly from stylists such as Diderot, Flaubert and the Gothic novelists. – his unpacking of ‘free indirect style’, how a third person narrative allows scope for the author, the narrator and the setting of the novel all to contribute in a comfortable polyphony. How Fiction Works is largely an outgrowth of Wood’s experience teaching at Harvard, where he’s been since 2003 and is now Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. – his defence of the moral aspect of the novel alongside its aesthetic and structural sides. I’m particularly won by several parts of Wood’s argument: A beautiful explication of how writers write, why writers write and why we read.
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