In How to Reread a Novel, professor and scholar Matthew Clark looks at the ways in which reading fiction is a complex experience of perception, cognition, and emotion. Through narrative techniques, writers create a unique experience for the reader and in rereading books, one can discover new pleasures about the mechanisms within the stories. The six chapters in this book explore these techniques, looking into the physicality of language in style and rhetorical figures; the relationship between storyteller and story listener; rhetorical prose in the work of Charles Dickens, Anne Bronte, and Toni Morrison; and tropes, such as metaphors and similes, in the work of Homer, Raymond Chandler, and Henry James. With this book, Clark aims to train readers to become better readers and enjoy more fully what makes reading fiction so unique. “Every novel has the potential to reveal something new,” writes Clark.
