Daniel R. Schwarz has studied and taught the modern British novel for decades and now brings his impressive erudition and critical acuity to this insightful study of the major authors and novels of the first half of the twentieth century.
An insightful study of British fiction in the first half of the twentieth century.
Draws on the author’s decades of experience researching and teaching the modern British novel.
Sets the modern British novel in its intellectual, cultural and literary contexts.
Asking why the 19th-century British novel features heroines, and how and why it features "feminine heroism," Susan Morgan traces the relationship between fictional depictions of gender and Victorian ideas of history and progress. Morgan approaches gender in selected 19th-century British novels as an imaginative category, accessible to authors and characters of either sex. Arguing that conventional definitions of heroism offer a fixed and history-denying perspective on life, the book traces a literary tradition that represents social progress as a process of feminization.
With Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner in mind, we have come to understand the novel as a form with intimate ties to the impulses and processes of memory. This study contends that this common perception is an anachronism that distorts our view of the novel. Based on an investigation of representative novels, Amnesiac Selves shows that the Victorian novel bears no such secure relation to memory, and, in fact, it tries to hide, evade, and eliminate remembering.
This book focuses on the work of a group of British novelists who have broken in different ways from the realist British novel of the post Second World War period without losing their broad appeal among readers. Authors discussed include Salman Rushdie, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro. All of these writers have been compelled to seek out new narrative strategies to give appropriate expression to their different responses to a world dominated by global capital and by the media and electronic systems of communication serving its ends.
Featuring a broad range of contemporary British novelists from Martin Amis to Ian McEwan, Nick Hornby 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 an analysis of their major works and themes. Fully cross-referenced and containing extensive guides to further reading, Contemporary British Novelists is the ideal guide to modern British fiction for both the student and the contemporary fiction buff alike.
