James Wood How Fiction Works
James Wood How Fiction Works. How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction—an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. James Wood, once a Guardian book reviewer, is now professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard.
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. Wood is controversial in that he spurns a narrow academic approach to literary criticism in favor of applying an aesthetic perspective to the fictional works he is reviewing. As discussed in depth elsewhere his fondness for what.
Literary critics are, above all, literary characters: verbal constructs that posture as human beings in order to sell some more or less persuasive story.
James Wood's How Fiction Works makes a passionate case for the novel, arguing that it puts other forms of creative writing firmly in the shade, says Peter Conrad.
James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of. In the second of two short prefaces to "How Fiction Works," an old-fashioned primer on literature that also functions as a timely primer on the art of modest self-marketing, the esteemed critic James Wood reaches out to assure "the common reader" (that good fellow from the club who tries to keep up with. How Fiction Works is also, although more tacitly, a defense of Wood's most controversial position as a critic.