How to Read Novels Like a Professor
Books | Literary Criticism / Comparative Literature
3.4
Thomas C. Foster
The follow-up and companion volume to the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor—a lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels to make everyday reading more enriching, satisfying, and funOf all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today’s masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history.Thomas C. Foster—the sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor—now examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors’ choices about structure—point of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuity—create meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.
AD
Buy now:
More Details:
Author
Thomas C. Foster
Pages
336
Publisher
Harper Collins
Published Date
2009-10-06
ISBN
0061977705 9780061977701
Community ReviewsSee all
"Could do with a bit less jauntiness.<br/><br/>Thomas Foster was likely an awesome professor, if only for his enthusiastic embrace of so many styles of literature. His insights into character development, anti-heroes, objective correlative, metafiction and post modernism are not only informative, they actually make you want to read the novels he discusses (I found myself taking copious notes on my GoodReads page). Unfortunately, his weakness for strained metaphors and folky asides weigh the book down considerably and quickly become irksome.<br/><br/>Still, major props for this engaging guide to a dizzying variety of novels by authors diverse in style, gender, ethnicity and era."