Reading the Novel in English 1950 - 2000

Reading the Novel in English 1950 - 2000
Author: Brian W. Shaffer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-02-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1405148802

Written in clear, jargon-free prose, this introductory text charts the variety of novel writing in English in the second half of the twentieth century. An engaging introduction to the English-language novel from 1950-2000 (exclusive of the US). Provides students both with strategies for interpretation and with fresh readings of selected seminal texts. Maps out the most important contexts and concepts for understanding this fiction. Features readings of ten influential English-language novels including Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Radical Fictions

Radical Fictions
Author: Nick Bentley
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783039109340

Nick Bentley takes a fresh look at English fiction produced in the 1950s. By looking at a range of authors, he shows that the novel of the period was far more diverse and formally experimental than previous accounts have suggested.

Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Author: David H. Richter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 111862114X

Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel is a lively exploration of the evolution of the English novel from 1688-1815. A range of major works and authors are discussed along with important developments in the genre, and the impact of novels on society at the time. The text begins with a discussion of the “rise of the novel” in the long eighteenth century and various theories about the economic, social, and ideological changes that caused it. Subsequent chapters examine ten particular novels, from Oroonoko and Moll Flanders to Tom Jones and Emma, using each one to introduce and discuss different rhetorical theories of narrative. The way in which books developed and changed during this period, breaking new ground, and influencing later developments is also discussed, along with key themes such as the representation of gender, class, and nationality. The final chapter explores how this literary form became a force for social and ideological change by the end of the period. Written by a highly experienced scholar of English literature, this engaging textbook guides readers through the intricacies of a transformational period for the novel.

Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900

Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900
Author: Daniel R. Schwarz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2018-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1118693418

An exploration of the modern European novel from a renowned English literature scholar Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 is an engaging, in-depth examination of the evolution of the modern European novel. Written in Daniel R. Schwarz's precise and highly readable style, this critical study offers compelling discussions on a wide range of major works since 1900 and examines recurring themes within the context of significant historical events, including both World Wars and the Holocaust. The author cites important developments in the evolution of the modern novel and explores how these paradigmatic works of fiction reflect intellectual and cultural history, including developments in painting and cinema. Schwarz focuses on narrative complexity, thematic subtlety, and formal originality as well as how novels render historical events and cultural developments Discussing major works by Proust, Camus, Mann, Kafka, Grass, di Lampedusa, Bassani, Kertesz, Pamuk, Kundera, Saramago, Muller and Ferrante, Schwarz explores how these often experimental masterworks pay homage to the their major predecessors—discussed in Schwarz's ground-breaking Reading the European Novel to 1900—even while proposing radical departures from realism in their approach to time and space, their testing the limits of language, and their innovative ways of rendering the human psyche. Written for teachers and students by a highly-acclaimed scholar and including valuable study questions, Reading the Modern European Novel since 1900 offers a guide for a deeper understanding of how these original modern masters respond to both the past and present.

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis
Author: Andrew James
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773588442

While it has become commonplace to discount British novelist Kingsley Amis as a "naïve realist," a mere comedic novelist, even a misogynist and failed moralist, Andrew James argues that Amis was seriously concerned with the role of the artist in society and explored this subject in many of his novels. Throughout the first twenty years of his career, Amis used bad artists as whimsical characters, or antimodels, that helped identify his artistic preferences and fictional techniques. He became convinced that the relationship between an artist and his audience was reciprocal and that both the outer audience and the artist's inner circle must be held accountable for the production of bad literature. During the last twenty years of his career, Amis no longer concerned himself with satirizing bad artists, but instead explored ways of ameliorating them. James shows that the development of antimodels as fully drawn characters and Amis's insistence upon reciprocity in the writer-reader relationship demonstrate that he was more than just a comedic writer, and was aware of himself as an artist with social responsibilities. The first study of Amis to analyze manuscript revisions in all of his novel drafts, Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience shows the more serious side of a complex writer who has yet to receive the critical recognition he deserves.

The Privilege of Crisis

The Privilege of Crisis
Author: Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-03-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3593393999

Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad--as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith--to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.

Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel

Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel
Author: Mine Özyurt Kiliç
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2013-01-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441108785

A detailed study of Maggie Gee's work that illustrates how she is rewriting the mid-Victorian condition-of-England novel for 21st-century Britain.

Martin Amis

Martin Amis
Author: Nick Bentley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2015
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0746311788

Nick Bentley offers a critical analysis to the main themes and literary techniques of Martin Amis, a leading literary figure who has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive literary style.

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism
Author: Richard Begam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199980969

Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith
Author: Philip Tew
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350309125

An introduction to the work of Zadie Smith, placing her fiction in a clear historical and theoretical context, and exploring her work in relation to contemporaneity and postcolonialism. Including a timeline of key dates, this guide offers an accessible reading of Smith's work and an overview of its critical reception.