A landmark work of literary criticism from one of Britain's best loved and most influential writers.

The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge’s typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.

"Important and original...The Modes of Modern Writing is an outstanding book." - Times Higher Education

"David Lodge is one of the ablest critics and theorists of the novel at work in England...[His] book is a very good one. It is bold and ambitious but always lucid and explicit, and it returns again and again to specific texts by way of both illustrating and testing its assertions." - The Yale Review

"[A] bold, incisive essay which, with admirable lucidity, offers its readers a brilliantly honed and deftly applied analytic tool." - The Times Literary Supplement

"[G]ripping in its pursuit of what literature is and how one recognizes it." - English Review