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Writing Fiction and Poetry — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / The Craft & The Art of Composition

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 11 primary public-domain works.

What this chamber argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of how literature is made — the literature of its own craft. It runs from the two foundational works of antiquity, Aristotle's Poetics (the first systematic theory of plot, character, and catharsis) and Horace's Ars Poetica (the verse letter that gave Europe in medias res, ut pictura poesis, and the rule of decorum), down through the Edwardian explosion of practical guides to writing the novel.
  • Two ancient poles govern everything that follows. Aristotle analyses: the Poetics is a descriptive science of what makes tragedy and epic work — mythos as the soul of the action, hamartia, peripeteia and anagnorisis, the purging of pity and fear. Horace prescribes: the Ars Poetica is the urbane working poet's rulebook — begin in the middle, hold the play to five acts, blend the useful and the sweet (miscuit utile dulci). Every later craft book descends from one pole or the other.
  • In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the craft of fiction became a public argument. Walter Besant's 1884 lecture 'The Art of Fiction' — claiming the novel is a fine art with teachable laws — provoked Henry James's famous reply of the same title; anonymous practical guides fed a new mass of aspiring novelists; Edith Wharton and Percy Lubbock, both schooled by James, turned point of view into the central technical question of the novel; and the style-and-usage tradition of Strunk (1918), Cody (1903), and Bennett (1914) made plain, observed prose a discipline.
  • The hexagonal gallery holds eleven public-domain works that cross every axis of the craft: poetry and prose, theory and manual, the ancient and the modern. Where a work's author has no public-domain portrait — Strunk, Lubbock, and the anonymous guide — the card shows the first edition's title page instead, marked as a representative image.

Primary works in this chamber (11)

Connected chambers

  • First Novels — Besant, Wharton, Lubbock, Bennett, and the anonymous Practical Guide all theorise the very form the First Novels hexagonal gallery collects. This is the workshop behind that gallery: the rules of plot, character, dialogue, and above all point of view by which the novel was consciously made into an art.
  • First Plays — Aristotle's Poetics is first of all a theory of tragedy — its analysis of plot, reversal, recognition, and catharsis is the foundation of all later dramatic theory, and Horace's five-act rule passed straight into the Renaissance stage.
  • Epics — Both ancient poles treat the epic as the highest narrative form: the Poetics compares tragedy and epic directly, and the Ars Poetica takes Homer as its model of the well-begun action. The craft hexagonal gallery reads the epics floor as its primary case study.
  • Wisdom Literature — The ars poetica is itself a wisdom genre — the verse epistle of practical precepts, kin to Proverbs and the maxim collection. Horace's letter to the Pisos is advice literature that happens to be about writing.