Lodge’s The Art of Fiction is grounded in the principles of rhetorical narratology, a critical approach that views fiction as a persuasive art. This tradition, most famously articulated in Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), examines how authors orchestrate technique to guide a reader’s emotional and intellectual responses. Lodge aligns himself with this methodology, stating in his Preface that he sees fiction as an art where the writer “persuades us to share a certain view of the world for the duration of the reading experience” (x), and he even suggests that his book could have been titled The Rhetoric of Fiction.

This framework shapes the book’s practice of close reading. In literary criticism, “close reading” refers to the careful analysis of short portions of the text, focusing on the sentences, figures of speech, and patterns in a passage. Using close reading, each chapter in The Art of Fiction isolates a literary device in a passage and analyzes its rhetorical function by demonstrating its effect on a reader. Essays like “Point of View” and “Irony” explore how narrative focalization creates moral alignment or evaluative distance. Others, like “Suspense,” break down the mechanics of creating anticipation by delaying information. By introducing specialized vocabulary—such as “metafiction” and “unreliable narrator”—and grounding the terms in textual examples, Lodge provides non-specialist readers with a toolkit for analyzing how literary effects are achieved. The book’s method is thus a practical application of rhetorical theory, teaching readers to recognize the craft behind their own responses.