Reading Fiction: Opening the Text

ISBN-13: 9780333801345 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 180 str.

Peter Childs

Opis

This book contains close readings of the opening pages of 24 widely taught texts, from Robinson Crusoe to The Buddha of Suburbia. Offering a wide coverage of English literature from the 18th to the 20th centuries, Reading Fiction illustrates a diverse range of approaches to the close reading of prose fiction. Childs' analyses are to both an overview of modes of fiction over the last 300 years as well as a guide to the methods and techniques of close reading.

Spis treści

Preface.- Introducing the Text.- Glossary.- Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe.- Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice.- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein.- Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre.- Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights.- Charles Dickens: Great Expectations.- George Eliot: Silas Marner.- Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.- Henry James: The Turn of the Screw.- Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness.- Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier.- James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.- May Sinclair: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean.- E. M. Forster: A Passage to India.- Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway.- Aldous Huxley: Brave New World.- George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier.- Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin.- Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano.- Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea.- Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber.- Salman Rushdie: Shame.- Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia.- Index.

O autorze

PETER CHILDS is Senior Lecturer in English at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education.

Blurb

In what ways does the opening of a novel relate to the narrative that unfolds from it? What are the different approaches to close reading a page of prose fiction? How does reading a text for a second time affect our understanding of the significance of its opening?

In this unique book, Peter Childs discusses the opening lines of 24 widely-studied literary texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. These analyses amount to both an overview of modes of fiction over the last 300 years and also a guide to techniques of close reading. The extracts are taken from the work of novelists ranging from Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie. This stimulating and illuminating book will be a useful text for undergraduates studying the novel and involved in critical appreciation and close textual analysis.

Texts discussed: Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Silas Marner, Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Turn of the Screw, Heart of Darkness, The Good Soldier, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, A Passage to India, Mrs Dalloway, Brave New World, The Road to Wigan Pier, Goodbye to Berlin, Under the Volcano, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Bloody Chamber, Shame, and The Buddha of Suburbia.