Knowra James Wood James Wood James Wood is a British literary critic, novelist, and essayist known for influential writing on contemporary fiction, realism, and narrative technique.
Free indirect discourse : A narrative mode that blends a character’s idiom and perspective with a narrator’s grammatical voice. Wood made this technique central to his account of how novels render consciousness.
Henry James : An American-born novelist and critic whose fiction explores consciousness, social relations, and narrative perspective. Wood presents James as a major precursor to modern techniques for representing consciousness.
The New Yorker : An American magazine of journalism, criticism, fiction, and cultural commentary. Wood has been a staff writer there, publishing literary criticism for a broad audience.
Postmodern literature : Fiction associated with self-conscious form, unstable meaning, and skepticism toward conventional representation. Wood often resists fiction that foregrounds artifice at the expense of embodied human experience.
Literary realism : A mode of fiction that represents recognizable social life through plausible characters, settings, and events. His criticism repeatedly tests how fiction makes invented lives feel real.
Gustave Flaubert : A French novelist whose formally controlled fiction includes Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education. Wood repeatedly draws on Flaubert to explain realism and the novel’s narrative voice.
The Guardian : A British newspaper founded in 1821, with international reporting and cultural coverage. Wood’s earlier British criticism appeared in the paper, helping establish his public profile.
Minimalism : A literary style marked by spare prose, limited description, and restrained characterization. Wood’s preference for richly rendered consciousness contrasts with minimalist restraint.
Narrative perspective : The position and viewpoint from which a story’s events are narrated. Wood analyzes how changes in narrative viewpoint shape a novel’s moral and emotional effects.
Virginia Woolf : An English novelist and essayist whose fiction experiments with consciousness, time, and point of view. Her novels exemplify the interiority and formal innovation Wood tracks in modern fiction.
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