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Points out how British novelist Pym (1913-80) parodied the conventions of romance novels by deflating characters, hyperbole, and exaggeration, or emphasizing meticulously the mundane elements of everyday life. Shows how she used food, clothes, heroin and hero characterizations, and marriage customs to portray her characters,' and perhaps her own, skepticism about the whole business. Paper edition (764-0), $18.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A collection of critical essays examine the Ellis Peters mystery series featuring the twelfth-century Benedictine monk and detective Brother Cadfael.
Such readers find allusions in Rice's work to that of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, to Ann Radcliffe's gothic romances, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, and to Bram Stoker's Dracula, as do such present-day authors as Clive Barker, Robert R. McCammon, and Stephen King.
This critical study explores late twentieth century novels by women writers--including Doris Lessing, May Sarton and Barbara Pym--that feature female protagonists over the age of sixty. These novels' discourses on aging contrast with those largely pejorative ones that dominate Western society. They break the silence that normally surrounds the lives of the aged, and this book investigates how older female protagonists are represented in relation to areas such as sexuality, dependence and everyday life. Beginning with an investigation of popular opinions about aging and a survey of hypotheses from disciplines including gerontology, psychology and feminism, the text reviews literary critical a...
The Making of Barbara Pym offers new insights into Pym’s formative years as a writer, during which she honed a complex view of the necessity of change on individual and cultural levels. Supported by newly published archival material, this comprehensive study of Pym’s early work explores her personal and fictional pre-war and wartime writing, including unpublished and posthumously published works, before looking closely at Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women, published during Britain’s post-war austerity period. Of central importance is a new recognition of Pym’s use of social roles, particularly those of women, as proper avenues for change. The book traces how Pym came to devise characters whose individual development can be seen as analogous to or representative of larger cultural movements. Pym uses the spinster figure to embody the forward-looking cultural perspectives that she endorsed and then, finally, in Jane and Prudence, to figure the end of Britain’s austerity period.
Reading Barbara Pym stakes out new territory in Pym criticism byquestioning the assumptions and predispositions by which her novelshave been received and judged. Early in Pym's career, reviews of hernovels likened her books in relaxed fashion to delicious tastes andsmells. Later (when mention of her twice in a TLS survey as one of thecentury's ten most underrated novelists secured and altered her criticalreception), and since her death in 1980, commentary in oppositelyvigilant fashion discovered in Pym's novels academic themes andgender/political issues ripe for exploration. But the traditional concernsof academic and popular criticism have sidestepped the morechallenging task of locating the power and quality of Pym's narrative, the reasons her novels are important to read personally as well asstudy academically
In this study of three of Barbara Pym’s novels, Naghmeh Varghaiyan, drawing on examinations of women’s humour by Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, and others, shows how the humorous female discourse in Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, and Jane and Prudence undermines patriarchal culture and subverts both female and male stereotypes such as that of the spinster and of the Byronic hero. Varghaiyan reveals how the rhetoric of women’s humour enables Pym’s female characters to survive in the patriarchal culture and to unsettle it.
This book analyses Barbara Pym’s published and unpublished work through a new image, that of the troublesome woman. It details the political nature of her work, highlighting her feminist ideas which are hidden in village-like settings and revealed by troublesome women. By exploring Pym’s written work, published, and unpublished, diaries and notebooks, the book shows that this material gives credence to Hilary Pym’s interpretation of her sister as a complex person.