The Craft of Fiction

Percy Lubbock's "The Craft of Fiction," like E. M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," is an essential work of criticism. Lubbock's outlook is an extension of Henry James's. More immediately accessible than James, Lubbock illustrates the "craft" by reference to classic novels such as Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," and of course James's own works, particularly "The Ambassadors." Lubbock, Forster, F. R. Leavis's "The Great Tradition," and Ian Watt's "Rise of the Novel" give you what you need to know if you want to understand the central canon in Anglo-American and European fiction. Lubbock's book is the one recommended by Graham Greene in his autobiography. Before embarking on his illustrious career, Greene studied "The Craft of Fiction" inside and out before embarking on his illustrious career. Perhaps no other stamp of approval is needed after that. Even if this book doesn't make a great novelist out of you, it will teach you how to recognize one. If you are interested in how the great novelists ply their trade, Percy Lubbock's book ranks right up there with the must-reads of novel how-to's.

Author: Percy Lubbock
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 01/24/2014
Pages: 138
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9781495318818
ISBN10: 1495318818
BISAC Categories:
- Language Arts & Disciplines | Writing | General
- Reference | General

About the Author
Percy Lubbock, (1879-1965) was an English man of letters, known as an essayist, critic and biographer. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1922, with his memoir of childhood summer holidays at Earlham Hall in Norfolk. He became an émigré, and lived in Gli Scafari on the Gulf of Spezia. Towards the end of his life he went blind. Remarkably well-placed socially, his intellectual connections included E. M. Forster, a Cambridge contemporary, Edith Wharton (a member of her Inner Circle from about 1906), Howard Sturgis and Bernard Berenson. He reviewed, anonymously in the columns of the Times Literary Supplement, significant modern novels including Forster's Howard's End. His 1921 book The Craft of Fiction ('the official textbook of the Modernist aesthetics of indirection') became a straw man for writers including Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene, who disagreed with his rather formalist view of the novel. Amongst his other works are: Samuel Pepys (1909), A Book of English Prose (1913) and Shades of Eton (1929).

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