Important and original...<i>The Modes of Modern Writing </i>is an outstanding book.
Times Higher Education
David Lodge is one of the ablest critics and theorists of the novel at work in England...[His] book is a very good one. It is bold and ambitious but always lucid and explicit, and it returns again and again to specific texts by way of both illustrating and testing its assertions.
The Yale Review
[A] bold, incisive essay which, with admirable lucidity, offers its readers a brilliantly honed and deftly applied analytic tool.
The Times Literary Supplement
[G]ripping in its pursuit of what literature is and how one recognizes it.
English Review
Preface
Prefatory note to the Second Impression
Acknowledgements
PART ONE: PROBLEMS AND EXECUTIONS
1. What is Literature
2. George Orwell's 'A Hanging', and 'Michael Lake Describes'
3. Oscar Wilde: 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'
4. What is Realism?
5. Arnold Bennett: The Old Wives' Tale
6. William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
7. The Realistic Tradition
8. Two Kinds of Modern Fiction
9. Crticism and Realism
10. The Novel and the Nouvelle Crtique
11. Conclusion to Part One
PART TWO: Metaphor and Metonymy
1. Jackobson's Theory
2. Two Types of Aphasia
3. The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles
4. Drama and Film
5. Poetry, Prose and the Poetic
6. Types of Description
7. The Executions Revisited
8. The Metonymic Text as Metaphor
9. Metaphor and Context
PART THREE: MODERNISTS, ANTIMODERNISTS AND POSTMODERNIST
1. James Joyce
2. Gertrude Stein
3. Ernest Hemingway
4. D.H. Lawrence
5. Virginia Woolf
6. In the Thirties
7. Philip Larkin
8. Postmodernist Fiction
Appendix A: 'A Hanging' by George Orwell
Appendix B: 'Michael Lake Describes What the Executioner Actually Faces'
Appendix C: Extract from The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Notes and References
Index