Literary Criticism that is fun to read
Discover witty and engaging literary criticism that makes analyzing books a joy. Explore fun, insightful reviews of must-read titles that entertain as they enlighten.
Book
How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain De Botton
A bestselling author draws on the work of one of history’s most important writers to show us how to best live life in a book that’s "delightfully original.... A self-help book in the deepest sense of the term" (The New York Times). Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life. Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work. Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.
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Book
The Art of Fiction
by David Lodge
The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded and collected together in book form. The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magical Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accessible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their application demonstrated. Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspirant writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.
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Book
The Rhetoric of Fiction
by Wayne C. Booth
A standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts. Its concepts and terms have become standard critical lexicon.
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ID: 0156027755
(Type: books)
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ID: 0099455447
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