A lesson on setting in prose fiction
The conventions regarding setting in novels and short stories have, like all conventions, evolved over time. In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge states that a "sense of place was a fairly late development in the history of prose fiction" and after comparing a description of London from Tom Jones (1749) with a far more vivid, sensory portrait from Oliver Twist (1839) he goes on to claim that: "What intervened was the...