Kenneth Millard – författare

The poets writing in the first years of the twentieth century have commonly been discussed in isolation. In Edwardian Poetry Kenneth Millard considers together seven poets, Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, A. E. Housman, John Davidson, and Rupert Brooke, and argues that their work is worthy of more serious critical attention than it has previously received. Through an analysis of numerous individual poems, Millard isolates certain common concerns: the changing and perhaps fading value of England ; a distrust of the medium of language itself; a distrust also of the creative imagination. In its reassessment of these poets, the book provides a literary context for their work, finding in it a kind of pre-War modern British poetry distinct from the Modernism of subsequent decades. In establishing a literary context for the poetry of this century's first decade the book offers an important revision of modern literary history and points towards an alternative line in twentieth-century British poetry that culminates in the work of Philip Larkin.

Contemporary American Fiction provides an introduction to American fiction since 1970. Offering substantial and detailed interpretations of more than thirty texts by thirty different writers, Millard combines them in an innovative critical structure designed to promote debates on cultural politics and aesthetic value. The book is the first of its kind to offer a wide-ranging survey of recent developments in the fiction of the United States. Recent novels by established writers such as John Updike and Philip Roth are analysed alongside the fiction of younger writers such as Gish Jen and Sherman Alexie. The books innovative structure encourages new ways of thinking about how American writers might be configured in relation to each other, while providing an analysis of how contemporary fiction has responded to changes in central areas of American life such as the family, the media, technology, and consumerism. Contemporary American Fiction is a substantial critical introduction to some of the most exciting fiction of the last thirty years, an eclectic and thorough advertisement for the extraordinary vitality of American fiction at the end of the twentieth century. This is an excellent introduction to the subject for undergraduate students of modern American literature.

This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures.This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents.A series of questions are asked:• Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the ‘fall’ of America?• What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?• Is the bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?• What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture?Although the focus is on the contemporary period, this is placed in the context of reference to earlier novels and criticism of the genre, as well as historical changes in the status of the family, and the adolescent within it.Features* Provides detailed interpretations of 12 key contemporary novels from authors including Purple America by Rick Moody, The Age of Consent by Geoffrey Wolff, The Virgin Suicides by Jefffrey Eugenides and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel.* Explains the importance of the coming-of-age genre to the broader American literature canon.* Makes a significant intervention in contemporary debate about what is most valuable in recent American fiction.