Materials and Methods of Fiction With an Introduction by Brander Matthews

The element of style, which has just been touched upon in reference to the short-story, must now be considered in its broader aspect as a factor of fiction in general. Hitherto,...

Before we set out upon a study of the materials and methods of fiction, we must be certain that we appreciate the purpose of the art and understand its relation to the other art...

Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what constitutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figurat...

In the history of figure painting it is interesting to study the evolution of the element of background. This element is non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art....

We have now examined in detail the elements of narrative, and must next consider the various points of view from which they may be seen and, in consequence, be represented. Gran...

Although all writers of fiction who take their work seriously and do it honestly are at one in their purpose--namely, to embody certain truths of human life in a series of imagi...

Since the aim of a short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis, it follows that, given any...

Robert Louis Stevenson, in his spirited essay entitled "A Humble Remonstrance," has given very valuable advice to the writer of narrative. In concluding his remarks he says, "An...

Turning our attention from the epic and the drama, and confining it to the general type of fiction which in the last chapter was loosely named novelistic, we shall find it possi...

We have now considered the subject-matter of fiction and also the contrasted attitudes of mind of the two great schools of fiction-writers toward setting forth that subject-matt...

Throughout the present volume, the word _fiction_ has been used with a very broad significance, to include every type of literary composition whose purpose is to embody certain...

been hanged in the Place de Grève. The hunchback, Quasimodo, has flung the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, from the tower-top of Notre Dame. This paragraph then brings the chapter to...

The features of any object that we contemplate may with intelligent judgment be divided into two classes, according as they are inherently essential, or else merely contributory...

Waterloo. The reader is kept in the city with the women of the story while the men are fighting on the field a dozen miles away. All day a distant cannonading rumbles on the ear...