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In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.
Featuring a broad range of contemporary British novelists from Iain Banks to Jeanette Winterson, Louis de Bernieres to Irvine Welsh and Salman Rushdie, this book offers an excellent introductory guide to the contemporary literary scene. Each entry includes concise biographical information on each of the key novelists and analysis of their major works and themes. Fully cross-referenced and containing extensive guides to further reading, Fifty Contemporary British Novelists is the ideal guide to modern British fiction for both the student and the contemporary fiction buff alike.
Using a wealth of contemporary sources, this book tells the story of the way in which the turbulent, hedonistic world of mid-nineteenth-century Paris touched the careers and work of a host of Victorian writers, major and minor. It attends both to the way writers actually experienced life in a capital city markedly different from London, and to how they retailed this to a swiftly-growing British readership. En route, it reveals the cosmopolitan world of the salonsand the social life of the British Embassy; demonstrates the risky competitive world of the freelance journalist; traces the developing role of the foreign correspondent, and examines the, sometimescontradictory, prejudices about Par...
No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a live...
A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.” Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers...
Two women, a world apart. A secret waiting to be discovered...
"An authoritative reference guide to the most important living novelists and short story writers in the English language."--Google Books viewed Sept. 22, 2021.
This timely in-depth study of award-winning Kate Atkinson's work provides a welcome comprehensive overview of the novels, play and short stories. It explores the major themes and aesthetic concerns in her fiction. Combining close analysis and literary contextualisation, it situates her multi-faceted work in terms of a hybridisation of genres and innovative narrative strategies to evoke contemporary issues and well as the past. Chapters offer insights into each major publication (from Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Big Sky, the latest instalment in the Brodie sequence, through the celebrated Life After Life and subsequent re-imaginings of the war) in relation to the key concerns of Atkinson's fiction, including self-narrativisation, history, memory and women’s lives.