A Companion To The British And Irish Novel 1945 2000

A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 serves as an extended introduction and reference guide to the British and Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of the millennium. Covers a wide range of authors from Samuel Beckett to Salman Rushdie Provides readings of key novels, including Graham Greene’s ‘Heart of the Matter’, Jean Rhys’s ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ Considers particular subgenres, such as the feminist novel and the postcolonial novel Discusses overarching cultural, political and literary trends, such as screen adaptations and the literary prize phenomenon Gives readers a sense of the richness and diversity of the novel during this period and of the vitality with which it continues to be discussed

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 provides insight into the critical traditions shaping the literary landscape of modern Britain.

This wide-ranging Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity. An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama. Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism. Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.

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.

Literary Research and British Postmodernism is a guide for researchers of postwar British literature that defines best practices for scholars conducting research in this period. Individual chapters connect the complex relationships between print and multimedia, technological advancements, and the influence of critical theory that converge in postwar British literature.

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex and still powerful relation between the novel and the world in which it is written, published and read. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of newer voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy, David Peace and Zadie Smith as well as those more established, such as Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding the decade.

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.

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

Few literary phenomena are as elusive and yet as persistent as realism. While it responds to the perennial impulse to use literature to reflect on experience, it also designates a specific set of literary and artistic practices that emerged in response to Western modernity. Landscapes of Realism is a two-volume collaborative interdisciplinary exploration of this vast territory, bringing together leading-edge new criticism on the realist paradigms that were first articulated in nineteenth-century Europe but have since gone on globally to transform the literary landscape. Tracing the manifold ways in which these paradigms are developed, discussed and contested across time, space, cultures and media, this first volume tackles in its five core essays and twenty-five case studies such questions as why realism emerged when it did, why and how it developed such a transformative dynamic across languages, to what extent realist poetics remain central to art and popular culture after 1900, and how generally to reassess realism from a twenty-first-century comparative perspective.

This study looks back at the picaresque, with its Spanish roots, and especially with its tradition in English literature; then, it comes to contemporary times, and identifies elements of the picaresque in contemporary novels. The main thesis of the author is that the picaresque has never left the literary scene in Britain, being an aesthetic invariant, which expresses a natural inclination of the British authors towards the picaresque story. Postcolonial authors also favour this genre as a consequence of their own literary tradition, which includes particular variants of the picaresque, and as a result of their own situation as immigrant/displaced authors, which gives them material for stories of displaced characters – rogues. The study rigorously identifies the sources of the contemporary protocols of the picaresque, as well as a few variants of picaresque stories in a selection of novels the author accounts for theoretically.

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many subcultures of Britain's teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of some of the most influential contemporary British writers. In this vivid work of cultural history, Stephen Ross explores: · The manic teenage vision of Absolute Beginners · The Angry Young Men of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning · Skinheads and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange · Irony and authenticity in the 1980s – from Amis to Kureishi · Heroin chic, disaffection and Trainspotting Examining the cultural contexts of some of the most important and popular post-1945 British novels, the book covers such themes as crises of masculinity, multiculturalism and inter-generational conflict, and in doing so casts new light on British writing today.

Often dismissed as sensationalist, transgressive fiction is a sophisticated movement with roots in Menippean satire and the Rabelaisian carnal folk sensibility praised by Bakhtin. This study, the first of its kind, provides a thorough literary background and analysis of key transgressive authors such as Acker, Amis, Carter, Ellis, and Palahniuk.

本书对马丁·艾米斯、伊恩·麦克尤恩和朱利安·巴恩斯三位作家的重要作品进行了研究，揭示出当代西方都市文化的多重困境，同时阐释了这种文化困境的表现方式及其产生的深层原因，解析了“三剑客”的文学作品所呈现的西方世界繁荣表象背后的真实本质，达成了对当代西方都市文化的多维认知和深入探究。

THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers. How and why 1980s fiction is a response to particular psychological, social and economic pressures is explored in detail. Drawing on the rise of individualism and the birth of neo-liberalism, contributors reflect on the tense relations between 1980s politics and realism, and between elegy and satire. Noting the creation of a 'heritage industry' during the decade, the rise of the historical novel is also considered against broader cultural changes. Viewed from the perspective of more recent theorisations of crisis following both 9/11 and the 21st-century financial crash, this study makes sense of why and how writers of the 1980s constructed fictions in response to this decade's own set of fundamental crises.

British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation, national identity and regional and ethnic diversity. These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas, such as art, sport, journalism, fashion, education, and race. This Companion addresses these and other major aspects of British culture, and offers a sophisticated understanding of what it means to study and think about the diverse cultural landscapes of contemporary Britain. Each contributor looks at the language through which culture is formed and expressed, the political and institutional trends that shape culture, and at the role of culture in daily life. This interesting and informative account of modern British culture embraces controversy and debate, and never loses sight of the fact that Britain and Britishness must always be understood in relation to the increasingly international context of globalisation.

The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism presents anedited collection of essays that explore the nature of Humanism asan approach to life, and a philosophical analysis of the keyhumanist propositions from naturalism and science to morality andmeaning. Represents the first book of its kind to look at Humanism notjust in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, but also itsconsequences and its diverse manifestations Features contributions from international and emergingscholars, plus renowned figures such as Stephen Law, CharlesFreeman and Jeaneanne Fowler Presents Humanism as a positive alternative to theism Brings together the world’s leading Humanist academics inone reference work