Preface THE ART OF FICTION - DAVID LODGE
I settled quite quickly on a format that was topic-centred rather than text-centred, since a novel, unlike many excellent poems, cannot be quoted in its entirety in a newspaper article. Each week I choose one or two short extracts from novels or stories, classic and modern, to illustrate some aspect of “The Art of Fiction”. (Following on Fenton's “Ars Poetica”, this was a more or less inevitable name for the series, and I have retained it for the book in spite of some uneasiness at trespassing on the title of a venerated essay by Henry James.) With a few exceptions - James Austen, George Eliot, Henry James - I took my examples from a different author, or brace of authors, each week. I confined myself almost exclusively to English and American writers, because this, as academics say, “my field” and I am less confident of doing accurate close analysis of novels outside it. I have commented on some of these passages before in print, but not in exactly the same terms.