A Study of Prose Fiction |
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Common terms and phrases
acters action actual Adam Bede admirable æsthetic American art of fiction artist beauty chapter char character climax conscious criticism Daniel Deronda delineation depicted Dickens drama effect element emotion English Novel experience expression fact feeling fiction-writer field forces French George Eliot give Hawthorne Henry James human imagination impression individual influence instinct interest landscape literary literature Marble Faun material means ment method Middlemarch mind modern moral nature novelist observation Old Mortality painting Partial Portraits passion personages persons play plot Poe's poet poetic poetry portrait precisely present prose fiction qualities question reader realism representative rôle romantic romantic fiction romanticism Scarlet Letter scene scientific Scott sense setting short story spirit stage story-writers student style sympathy tale Thackeray theme theory things Thomas Hardy tion tive traits truth ture turn Vanity Fair words writer
Popular passages
Page 173 - There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.
Page 267 - The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist...
Page 267 - ... the truth of the human heart — has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.
Page 305 - Yet these commonplace people - many of them - bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right...
Page 150 - There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly — you must bear with me while I try to make this clear...
Page 301 - In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design.
Page 210 - Our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical ; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards a common end.
Page 232 - I ever met with. The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going ; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.
Page 301 - A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.
Page 300 - ... in the composition of a rhymed poem, not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour.