The Modern British Novel


Book Description

Bradbury argues that almost a century since the emergence of Modernism, it is now possible to see the entire period in perspective. It is clear that the first 50 years - from Henry James, Wilde and Stevenson, through James Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, to Huxley, Isherwood and Orwell - have been extensively discussed in print. The years since World War II, though, have not been examined in depth, yet have produced talents such as Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Beckett, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo.




The Modern British Novel


Book Description

Bradbury argues that almost a century since the emergence of Modernism, it is now possible to see the entire period in perspective. It is clear that the first 50 years - from Henry James, Wilde and Stevenson, through James Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, to Huxley, Isherwood and Orwell - have been extensively discussed in print. The years since World War II, though, have not been examined in depth, yet have produced talents such as Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, Beckett, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo.




Standard Deviations


Book Description

Analyzing works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, the author offers a new approach to narrative theory by showing how successive generations of novelists have used ever more powerful concepts of chance even though, he argues, chance is precisely what narrative cannot represent, since when it tries to do so it slips into the fated. He also relates the novelistic treatment of chance to important historical currents in the philosophical and scientific understanding of chance, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the representation of chance in any narrative. The author asks three central questions: Why did British novelists become intensely interested in chance in the late nineteenth century? Why and how did they thematize it in their fiction? How did the novelistic treatment of chance contribute to innovations in narrative form?




Contemporary British Novel Since 2000


Book Description

Focuses on the novels published since 2000 by twenty major British novelistsThe Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 is divided into five parts, with the first part examining the work of four particularly well-known and highly regarded twenty-first century writers: Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. It is with reference to each of these novelists in turn that the terms arealist, apostmodernist, ahistorical and apostcolonialist fiction are introduced, while in the remaining four parts, other novelists are discussed and the meaning of the terms amplified. From the start it is emphasised that these terms and others often mean different things to different novelists, and that the complexity of their novels often obliges us to discuss their work with reference to more than one of the terms.Also discusses the works of: Maggie OFarrell, Sarah Hall, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Atkinson, Salman Rushdie, Adam Foulds, Sarah Waters, James Robertson, Mohsin Hamid, Andrea Levy, and Aminatta Forna.




The Contemporary British Novel


Book Description

Second edition of this guide for students studying contemporary British writing - written by one of the key academics in the field of modern fiction studies.




Dark Humour and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel


Book Description

Colletta uses psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humour to argue that dark humour is an important, defining characteristic of Modernism. She brings together the usual suspects alongside more often overlooked writers from the period, and asks probing questions about the relationship between a dark humour that 'revels in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness' and the historical and social circumstances of the period. Colletta makes a compelling argument that probing deeply into the nature of humour or satire that define these 'social comedies' brings to light a more complex, and more accurate, understanding of the social changes and historical circumstances that define the modern era.




Late Modern English


Book Description

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented surge of interest in the language of the Late Modern English period. Late Modern English: Novel Encounters covers a broad range of topics addressed by international experts in fields such as phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, spelling and pragmatics; this makes the collection attractive to any scholar or student interested in the history of English. Each of the four thematic sections in the book represents a core area of Late Modern English studies. This division makes it easy for specialists to access the chapters that are of immediate relevance to their own work. An introductory chapter establishes connections between chapters within as well as between the four sections. The volume highlights recent advances in research methodology such as spelling normalization and other areas of corpus linguistics; several contributions also shed light on the interplay of internal and external factors in language change.




Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel


Book Description

Explores how the experience of time in contemporary British novels reveals the persistence of the utopian imagination today.




The Cambridge History of the English Novel


Book Description

The Cambridge History of the English Novel chronicles an ever-changing and developing body of fiction across three centuries. An interwoven narrative of the novel's progress unfolds in more than fifty chapters, charting continuities and innovations of structure, tracing lines of influence in terms of themes and techniques, and showing how greater and lesser authors shape the genre. Pushing beyond the usual period-centered boundaries, the History's emphasis on form reveals the range and depth the novel has achieved in English. This book will be indispensable for research libraries and scholars, but is accessibly written for students. Authoritative, bold and clear, the History raises multiple useful questions for future visions of the invention and re-invention of the novel.




Dangerous Intimacies


Book Description

Examines accounts of sapphic relations in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century texts, both to show how such stories were used to help consolidate more bourgeois values, and to widen our idea of what kinds of relationships existed between women