The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.
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
