Book: Guide to Fiction
Writer: D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke,
Publisher: (Sarasavi, 2023)
Building on the companion volumes, Guide to Literary Criticism and Guide to Poetry, this book carries literary education a stage further: it concentrates on fiction. It is meant to train the reader to get to grips with the range and variety of experience as well as the range and variety of forms and styles displayed in fiction from the age of Jane Austen to the present by writers of diverse backgrounds – British, Afro-American, Indian, migrant, and postcolonial.
It illuminates the issues they raise, their standpoint, language and techniques they adopt, as shaped by the periods and countries in which they lived.
The examples are taken from stories and novels prescribed in examination syllabuses for the G.C.E. Ordinary Level as well as Advanced Level, also for university examinations.
Guide to Fiction is essential reading for success-oriented students. It is also addressed to teachers as a means of enabling them to guide students. It will also prove rewarding to readers and writers of literature in English, Sinhala and Tamil, and, indeed, to all those interested in the use of words – by sensitising responses to language and by widening horizons.
D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Kelaniya, was Foundation Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Henry Charles Chapman Visiting Fellow, University of London; and Guest Professor at the University of Tubingen, West Germany. A well-established critic of twentieth century and postcolonial literature, and the leading authority on Sri Lankan English literature, his books in print include Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire (Macmillan, 1988), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Routledge, 2007), Salman Rushdie (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed 2010) and Sri Lankan English Literature and the Sri Lankan People 1917-2003 (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2nd ed 2007). He has edited Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (Canada: Broadview Press, 3rd ed 2020), Kaleidoscope: An Anthology of Sri Lankan English Literature Vols 1 &2 (Vijitha Yapa, 2007, 2010).