British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s

British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s
Author: Joseph Darlington
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331977896X

This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s
Author: J. Russell Perkin
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0228007631

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works. In Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success – a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows. Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.

British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975
Author: Andrew Radford
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2021-08-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030727661

This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

Between Form and Faith

Between Form and Faith
Author: Martyn Sampson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823294684

What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.

Critical Perspectives on Max Porter

Critical Perspectives on Max Porter
Author: David Rudrum
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2024-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1003857485

Max Porter is amongst the most exciting British writers of the twenty-first century. His striking books straddle the divide between poetry and prose as deftly as they combine literary experimentation with mainstream success. This book is the first study of his works to date, which encompass Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon (2021) and Shy (2023). It features a broad interdisciplinary array of essays (by poets, novelists, literary critics, art historians and educationalists), which collectively place Porter’s works in their contexts, shed light on his artistic vision and interpret his texts from a range of critical perspectives. The volume’s 12 chapters combine readings of the literary, formal, intertextual and experimental aspects of Porter’s works with discussions of their relation to social, political and ethical questions, whilst placing them in dialogue with highly topical critical and cultural debates, such as Englishness in the aftermath of Brexit, ecocriticism, affectivity and posthumanism.

The Chapter

The Chapter
Author: Nicholas Dames
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691135193

A history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to today. Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.

The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction

The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction
Author: Nick Hubble
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2014-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441156712

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1970s shape Contemporary British Fiction? Exploring the impact of events like the Cold War, miners' strikes and Winter of Discontent, this volume charts the transition of British fiction from post-war to contemporary. Chapters outline the decade's diversity of writing, showing how the literature of Ian McEwan and Ian Sinclair interacted with the experimental work of B.S. Johnson. Close contextual readings of Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish and English novels map the steady break-up of Britain. Tying the popularity of Angela Carter and Fay Weldon to the growth of the Women's Liberation Movement and calling attention to a new interest in documentary modes of autobiographical writing, this volume also examines the rising resonance of the marginal voices: the world of 1970s British Feminist fiction and postcolonial and diasporic writers. Against a backdrop of social tensions, this major critical reassessment of the 1970s defines, explores and better understands the criticism and fiction of a decade marked by the sense of endings.

Terror in Black September

Terror in Black September
Author: David Raab
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2007-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230606849

On Sunday, September 6, 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four airliners bound from Europe for New York. One, a brand new Pan Am 747, was taken to Cairo and blown up only seconds after its passengers escaped. The attempt to hijack a second plane, an El Al flight, was foiled and the plane landed safely in the UK. Two other planes, one TWA and one Swissair, were directed to the desert floor thirty-five miles northeast of Amman, Jordan, where a twenty-five day hostage drama began. With the additional hijacking of a British airliner, over four hundred and fifty hostages had landed in the Jordanian desert. David Raab was on the TWA flight with his mother and siblings but was separated from them and taken to a refugee camp and then to an apartment in Amman where he was held hostage through a civil war. This is his story.

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary British Children’s Literature
Author: Blanka Grzegorczyk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2020-05-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351385380

The widespread threat of terrorist and counter-terrorist violence in the twenty-first century has created a globalized context for social interactions, transforming the ways in which young people relate to the world around them and to one another. This is the first study that reads post-9/11 and 7/7 British writing for the young as a response to this contemporary predicament, exploring how children’s writers find the means to express the local conditions and different facets of the global wars around terror. The texts examined in this book reveal a preoccupation with overcoming various forms of violence and prejudice faced by certain groups within post-terror Britain, as well as a concern with mapping out their social relations with other groups, and those concerns are set against the recurring themes of racist paranoia, anti-immigrant hostility, politicized identities, and growing up in countries transformed by the effects of terror and counter-terror. The book concentrates on the relationship between postcolonial and critical race studies, Britain’s colonial legacy, and literary representations of terrorism, tracing thematic and formal similarities in the novels of both established and emerging children’s writers such as Elizabeth Laird, Sumia Sukkar, Alan Gibbons, Muhammad Khan, Bali Rai, Nikesh Shukla, Malorie Blackman, Claire McFall, Miriam Halahmy, and Sita Brahmachari. In doing so, this study maps new connections for scholars, students, and readers of contemporary children’s fiction who are interested in how such writing addresses some of the most pressing issues affecting us today, including survival after terror, migration, and community building.

Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction

Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction
Author: Alan Burton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1442255870

The Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction is a detailed overview of the rich history and achievements of the British espionage story in literature, cinema and television. It provides detailed yet accessible information on numerous individual authors, novels, films, filmmakers, television dramas and significant themes within the broader field of the British spy story. It contains a wealth of facts, insights and perspectives, and represents the best single source for the study and appreciation of British spy fiction. British spy fiction is widely regarded as the most significant and accomplished in the world and this book is the first attempt to bring together an informed survey of the achievements in the British spy story in literature, cinema and television. The Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on individual authors, stories, films, filmmakers, television shows and the various sub-genres of the British spy story. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about British spy fiction.