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English Writers - A Bibliography with Vignettes
One of the most important works of twentieth-century British literature, The Good Soldier addresses the lives and interrelationships between two couples: one American, one British. A tragicomic novel of manners, in which John Dowell narrates the disintegration of both his own and another marriage, the work’s depiction of passion and intrigue offers an ironic reading of Edwardian-era values. The Broadview edition features the text of the first edition of the novel published by John Lane and The Bodley Head in 1915. It also includes: other writings by Ford Madox Ford (“On Heaven,” excerpts from Henry James: A Critical Study, “On Impressionism,” and “Techniques”); contemporary reviews; and Ezra Pound’s obituary of Ford Madox Ford.
Engaging and energetic, this biography of Ford Madox Ford presents the modernist writer in a previously unexplored way. Other biographies have approached Ford as an author; indeed, his memoirs give almost no indication that the women in his life were of any importance or, in fact, that they ever existed. Literary scholar Joseph Wiesenfarth revises this approach by tracing Ford's relationships with four women central to his life. Wiesenfarth shows how these four women--Violet Hunt, Jean Rhys, Stella Bowen, and Janice Biala--established themselves as artists in their own right and depicted Ford in their works as more than the "proper man" he thought himself to be. For the women, he was both a lover and a leaver, a collaborator and a companion. With an eye to original paintings and manuscripts, Wiesenfarth examines the artistic and romantic interplay among these writers, painters, and lovers. This book features a beautifully illustrated color and black-and-white gallery of Bowen and Biala paintings.
Written in 1915, The Shadow-Line is based upon events and experiences from twenty-seven years earlier to which Conrad returned obsessively in his fiction. A young sea captain's first command brings with it a succession of crises: his sea is becalmed, the crew laid low by fever, and his deranged first mate is convinced that the ship is haunted by the malignant spirit of a previous captain. This is indeed a work full of "sudden passions", in which Conrad is able to show how the full intensity of existence can be experienced by the man who, in the words of the older Captain Giles, is prepared to "stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience." A subtle and penetrating analysis of the nature of manhood, The Shadow-Line investigates varieties of masculinity and desire in a subtext that counters the tale's seemingly conventional surface.
Just Assassins examines terrorism as it's manifested in Russian culture past and present, with essays devoted to Russian literature, film, and theater; historical narrative; and even amateur memoir, songs, and poetry posted on the Internet. Along with editor Anthony Anemone's introduction, these essays chart the evolution of modern political terrorism in Russia, from the Decembrist uprising to the horrific school siege in Beslan in 2004, showing how Russia's cultural engagement with its legacy of terrorism speaks to the wider world.
From the contents: Conrad's debt to Marguerite Poradowska (Susan Jones).- Conrad and Alfred Russel Wallace (Amy Houston).- Conrad's The idiots and Maupassant's La mere aux monstres (Gene M. Moore).- Conrad, Anatole France, and the early French Romantic tradition: some influences (Owen Knowles).- 'One can learn something from Balzac': Conrad and Balzac (J.H. Stape).
The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.
In the first critical study wholly devoted to Joseph Conrad's use of techniques associated with the literary tradition of romance, Baxter explores the ways in which Conrad borrows from, alludes to, and subverts the tropes of romance. Baxter examines not only familiar novels like Lord Jim but also less-studied works such as Romance and The Rover. Her study enables a new appreciation of the ways in which Conrad continued to experiment, even in his later fiction, and of the ethical import of that aesthetic experimentation.
Joseph Conrad's centrality to modern literature is well established. The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad provides essential guidance to varied developments in the field of Conrad studies since the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996). The volume's thirteen chapters offer diverse perspectives on emergent areas of interest, including canon formation, postcolonialism, gender, critical reception and adaptation. Likewise, chapters on Conrad's autobiographical writings, Heart of Darkness and 'The Secret Sharer', consider recent trends in both literary and cultural studies. A chronology and an updated guide to further reading serve to provide essential orientation to a large and complex field. This volume is the ideal starting point for students new to Conrad's work as well as for scholars wishing to keep abreast of current issues.