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This creative yet scholarly book discusses prose's important relationship to close literary analysis, showing how such an approach can be beneficial for readers, scholars, and writers alike. Bringing together a literary history that consists of writers such as Lermontov, Chekhov, Camus, and Calvino, Mark Axelrod masterfully interweaves discussions of structure, context, genre, plot, and other key elements often applied to poetry but seldom applied to various forms of prose in order to offer bold and surprisingly fresh claims about the writer's purpose. By peeling back these layers of technique and style, this book opens up discussions to better understand and appreciate great dramatists, writers, and poets throughout time by returning back to the core elements that originally comprised their writing crafts. Mark Axelrod is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Chapman University, USA.

Literature. --- Comparative literature. --- Poetry. --- Fiction. --- Comparative Literature. --- Poetry and Poetics. --- Prose literature --- Technique. --- Comparative literature --- Literature, Comparative --- History and criticism --- Philology --- Poems --- Poetry --- Verses (Poetry) --- Literature --- Fiction --- Metafiction --- Novellas (Short novels) --- Novels --- Stories --- Novelists --- Philosophy

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'As a fiction writer himself and a scholar who has thought about modernism and postmodernism from a theoretical perspective, Mark Axelrod is in a unique position to formulate a nuanced un-theory of the novel tackling this literary tradition since the inception of the genre in the 17th century up to our present, discombobulated days.' - Pablo Baler, Professor of Latin American Literature, California State University, Los Angeles, USA This book takes a closer look at the diversity of fiction writing from Diderot to Markson and by so doing call into question the notion of a singular “theory of fiction,” especially in relation to the novel. Unlike Forster’s approach to “Aspects of the Novel,” which implied there is only one kind of novel to which there may be an aspect, this book deconstructs how one approach to studying something as protean as the novel cannot be accomplished. To that end, the text uses Diderot’s This Is Not A Story (1772) and David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel (2016) as a frame and imbedded within are essays on De Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (1829), Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs Of Braz Cubas (1881), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945).

Fiction. --- Literature, Modern—18th century. --- Literature, Modern—19th century. --- Critical theory. --- Eighteenth-Century Literature. --- Nineteenth-Century Literature. --- Critical Theory. --- Critical social theory --- Critical theory (Philosophy) --- Critical theory (Sociology) --- Negative philosophy --- Criticism (Philosophy) --- Philosophy, Modern --- Rationalism --- Sociology --- Frankfurt school of sociology --- Socialism --- Fiction --- Metafiction --- Novellas (Short novels) --- Novels --- Stories --- Literature --- Novelists --- Philosophy --- History and criticism --- Theory, etc. --- Diderot, Denis, --- Short stories. --- Diderot, Denis --- D..., --- Didero, Deni --- Diderot --- Diderot, Pantophile --- Didro, Deni --- D̲intero, D̲eni --- דידרו, דני --- דידרו, דני, --- Dīdiraw --- Dīdirū --- ‏ديدرو