Synopses & Reviews
The Workings of Fiction is a collection of essays, chiefly on British and American novels and novelists, that shows a masterful critic at work. Each of the essays examines a different aspect of the novelists' art as one uniquely astute critical mind observes them. The central issue Robert Heilman confronts--often by studying the novels in pairs--is how the novelist does what he does.
Dealing with subjects as diverse as Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Evelyn Waugh, Heilman studies the workings of fiction from varied stances. He investigates the uses of the verbal medium and the several means by which a given theme is developed. As Heilman identifies and traces particular themes, he studies how parts are assembled into a whole. In addition, he explores particular generic types--like the picaresque, the gothic, the tragic--as they are used by a variety of novelists.
Written by a gifted man of letters, The Workings of Fiction takes us inside the process of criticism. The book offers us an original and perceptive view of Under the Volcano as it offers of Pride and Prejudice or The Turn of the Screw. Each essay presents a fresh way of looking at and understanding these novels. This collection will be of interest to anyone who desires insight into the workings of fiction.
Review
This collection . . . represents state-of-the-art women’s history. It proves the point that women’s historians have long asserted but not always demonstrated: that unless women’s lives are considered, the history of societies’ economic, political, and social realms will remain incomplete and inadequately understood.”
—Victoria Bynum, author of Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South
Review
"This is a fine collection of essays, which do nicely illustrate, as the title argues, the workings of fiction. With its careful analysis of structure the author's technical resources, this collection would make a very useful text for a course on the technique of fiction from its inception to the early twentieth century."--Studies in Short Fiction
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 367-372) and index.
About the Author
Robert Bechtold Heilman is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of numerous books, including The Ways of the World: Comedy and Society, winner of the 1979 Christian Gauss Prize.