The Language of Fiction
The Craft of Writing and the Pleasures of Reading
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Publishing:29th Jan '27
£18.95
This title is due to be published on 29th January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A master class in the language of fiction and a vivid reminder of how great novels can enrich our lives.
What distinguishes the prose of great novels? How have celebrated novelists shaped language into a lasting source of insight and aesthetic pleasure? In The Language of Fiction, Robert Alter—one of our most distinguished literary critics—explores the literary devices and techniques novelists have used to write fiction that is illuminating, surprising, and a delight to read.
Drawing on a lifetime of close reading, Alter guides readers through the writing of Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and more. With his characteristic clarity and sensitivity, Alter shows how these writers make use of word choice, metaphor, rhythm, perspective, and syntax in crafting the language of their novels. He carefully explains, for example, how James Joyce introduces invented words in Ulysses to represent the mind of a husband tormented by the thought of his wife’s unfaithfulness, how Willa Cather uses figuration in her otherwise austere O Pioneers! to establish the felt world in which her story will unfold, and how Ann Patchett uses shifting perspectives in Bel Canto to explore the layered nature of language.
The Language of Fiction shows what true mastery of literary style looks like, something AI may imitate but cannot create. It offers not only a path to more attentive reading but a guide to writing itself, revealing how the prose of great writers can deepen our understanding, expand our inner lives, and inspire us to write with greater precision and power.
Closely examines humanity’s relationship with reading—how fictional prose can entertain and surprise readers and expand their inner lives…Readers will walk away with a deeper appreciation of the written word. * Publishers Weekly *
A feast both for the language-starved and for connoisseurs, The Language of Fiction instructs us how to read complex texts by doing it, by presenting and unpacking amazing feats of linguistic skill in an effort at once to allow their authors to dazzle us and to produce in us a hunger for more. It’s a very successful strategy presented in a succession of chapters of which the ones on rhythm and syntax are especially illuminating. -- Stanley Fish, author of How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
At a time when the art of reading feels increasingly endangered, The Language of Fiction makes a forceful argument for literature's incomparable joys. Beyond the depth and breadth of Alter’s erudition, what stands out is his infectious love of language. This book has helped teach me not only how to read, but how to write. -- Daniel Mason, author of North Woods: A Novel
The Language of Fiction is a terrific entry point to the excitement of the close reading of literary fiction, alive to the 'artful distinctiveness' of what language and form can do. It is the culmination of a lifetime’s immersion in the written word and the pleasures of pedagogy. -- Helen Small, author of The Value of the Humanities
Robert Alter has written a book for word junkies and story junkies, a guided tour through masterpieces of fiction in English. Readers well-versed in Sterne, Melville, James, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner will savor their distinctive styles again in Alter’s exuberant account, and readers eager to try these adventures for the first time could find no better teacher. Alter is a passionate, lucid, and generous reader. -- Rosanna Warren, author of The Fair Fields: My Way to Words and Hindsight: Poems
In this exuberant meditation on the language of fiction, Robert Alter once again demonstrates that, as a sensitive reader of prose, he has no match. Considering figurative language and the intertwining of language, rhythm, and syntax, Alter shows how great novelists use the resources of language to convey a unique vision and for the sheer pleasure of inventiveness. -- Gary Saul Morson, author of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
ISBN: 9780674308374
Dimensions: 210mm x 140mm x 13mm
Weight: 360g
176 pages