Motives for Fiction

Robert Alter

      I. Fiction and Reality

    1. Mimesis and the Motive for Fiction
    2. History and the New American Novel
    3. The American Political Novel
    4. The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Norman Mailer
    5. Nabokov and the Art of Politics
    6. Ada, or the Perils of Paradise
    7. Tristrant Shandy and the Game of Love
    8. The Demons of History in Dickens's Tale
    9. Flaubert Through His Letters
    10. Proust and the Ideological Reader
    11. Borges, Stevens, and Post-Symbolist Writing
    12. Daniel Martin and the Mimetic Task

      13. II. The Stances of Criticism

    13. The American Edmund Wilson
    14. Literature and Ideology in the Thirties
    15. The Education of Alfred Kazin
    16. Literary Lives
    • Notes
    • Credits
    • Index
  • Cover: Motives for Fiction

Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous critical works, the most recent of which is the prize-winning book The Art of Biblical Narrative.