Novelists on the Novel

First published in 1959, Novelists on the Novel makes an attempt to set out fully what novelists both major and minor have to say about the practice of their art. It draws on the experience of English, French and Russian novelists so that the general reader and the more serious literature student can find out what they have to say about the novel as a literary form. The included passages come from novels themselves, from diaries, letters, notebooks, etc., and together constitute something like an aesthetic of the novel. Using these sources, the book tries to answer the following questions: What is a novel? what are the problems which face the novelist when he sits down to write a work of fiction? How is he to tell his story? What exactly is meant by the ’point of view’? How should he manipulate time? How is he, in one of the possible senses of the word, to make his characters seem ’real’? What are the functions of dialogue and how should it be dovetailed into narrative?