Randall Stevenson – författare

Covers a wide range of modernist novelists and novels, and also provides a guide to key developments in the genre. This revised edition includes a new discussion of "Heart of Darkness", an expanded section on gender and a revised section on the politics of Modernism.

The Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre tells the story of drama and performing in Scotland from the earliest traces of folk plays, performances, and royal ceremonies in the medieval period right up to the challenges of the present post-pandemic moment in the professional theatre. It brings together distinguished scholars, theatre professionals, critics and reviewers to share their experiences of studying and in some cases producing the most significant landmarks of Scottish stage history, discussing pivotal plays and productions (Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd, Home's Douglas, adaptations of Rob Roy and the 'National Drama', Lamont Stewart's Men Should Weep, Lochhead's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Cut Off), writers (including Joanna Baillie, J.M Barrie, James Bridie, John McGrath, and the writers of the radical post-Millenium generation), and companies (including The Scottish National Players, The Glasgow Citizens, 7:84, Wildcat, Communicado, and the National Theatre of Scotland) alongside incisive accounts of the cultural contexts (from the Reformation to the Thatcher government and beyond) that produced and challenged them. Separate chapters explore Scots language and Gaelic drama; the popular theatrical forms of the travelling 'geggies', music hall, variety, and pantomime; theatre for young audiences; radio and television drama; the significant roles of the director and the theatre critic and reviewer in shaping Scottish theatre; and the Scottish stage's long history of dialogue with performance traditions in England, Ireland, and Continental Europe. Contributors describe the often-fierce struggles that led to the opening up of the Scottish stage to working-class voices and audiences, women writers and performers, writers of colour, LGBTQ+ voices, innovators in dramatic form, and the long process leading towards the foundation of the NTS, and its early work alongside other key developments in the twenty-first century.

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the 60s, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety and inventiveness of earlier years.As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth-century to shadows of war and loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general.Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful description of writing in the later twentieth-century a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognised. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the sixties, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety and inventiveness of earlier years.As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth century - to shadows of war and loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general.Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful description of writing in the later twentieth century - a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognized. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.The Great War shaped the modern world, and much of its literary imagination. Literature and the Great War insightfully reassesses this impact, analysing a wide range of authors, both established and less well-known, and re-examining critical judgements, popular assumptions - even 'myths' - about war writing that have developed in the century or so that has followed. By looking at all genres of Great War writing in a single volume, the study allows reconsideration of the relative merits of the period's much-praised poetry and its generally less celebrated narrative texts. Randall Stevenson looks far beyond the work of soldier-authors, considering also the role of an older generation of writers - ones whose reputations were established before the war began - as well as the impact of war on the modernist imagination developing afterwards, in the 1920s. Literature and the Great War examines the context in which this literature was produced. Taking into consideration military life, the role of newspapers, war correspondents, politicians and propagandists. The unintelligible violence of the Great War placed a huge amount of pressure on the language, imagination, and textual practice of all who attempted to describe it. Incisively reconsidering these fundamental issues, Literature and the Great War challenges and rejuvenates approaches to its subject, redefining the interconnections of history, culture, and literary imagination in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.The Great War shaped the modern world, and much of its literary imagination. Literature and the Great War insightfully reassesses this impact, analysing a wide range of authors, both established and less well-known, and re-examining critical judgements, popular assumptions - even 'myths' - about war writing that have developed in the century or so that has followed. By looking at all genres of Great War writing in a single volume, the study allows reconsideration of the relative merits of the period's much-praised poetry and its generally less celebrated narrative texts. Randall Stevenson looks far beyond the work of soldier-authors, considering also the role of an older generation of writers - ones whose reputations were established before the war began - as well as the impact of war on the modernist imagination developing afterwards, in the 1920s. Literature and the Great War examines the context in which this literature was produced. Taking into consideration military life, the role of newspapers, war correspondents, politicians and propagandists. The unintelligible violence of the Great War placed a huge amount of pressure on the language, imagination, and textual practice of all who attempted to describe it. Incisively reconsidering these fundamental issues, Literature and the Great War challenges and rejuvenates approaches to its subject, redefining the interconnections of history, culture, and literary imagination in the early decades of the twentieth century.

An imaginatively constructed new literary history of the twentieth century.This companion with a difference sets a controversial new agenda for literary -historical analysis. Far from the usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures, this reference work for the new century cuts across familiar categories, focusing instead on literary ‘hot spots’: Freud’s Vienna and Conrad’s Congo in 1899, Chicago and London in 1912, the Somme in July 1916, Dublin, London and Harlem in 1922, and so on, down to Bradford and Berlin in 1989 (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the new digital media), Stockholm in 1993 (Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize) and September 11, 2001.

A wide-ranging study of shifting temporalities and their literary consequences in twentieth-century fictionFrom the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 to the celebration of the millennium in 2000; from the fiction of Joseph Conrad to the novels of William Gibson and W.G. Sebald, 'Reading the Times' offers fresh insight into modern narrative. It shows how profoundly the structure and themes of the novel depend on attitudes to the clock and to the sense of history's passage, tracing their origins in technologic, economic and social change. It offers a new and powerful way of understanding the relations of history with narrative form, outlining the development and demonstrating through incisive analyses of a very wide range of literary texts from late nineteenth to early twenty-first century their key role in shaping fictional narrative throughout this period. The result is a highly innovative literary history of twentieth-century fiction, based on an inventive, enabling method of understanding literature in relation to history in terms, in every sense, of its reading of its times.Key FeaturesProvides a detailed history of the role of the clock and temporality in twentieth-century lifeIncludes incisive analyses of this role's shaping of literary imagination traced in a very broad range of twentieth-century novelsProvides a unique, highly original literary history of the period's fiction

Academics, postgraduates, upper level undergraduates in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Novel, Modern Fiction, Narrative Theory / Narratology, Literary Criticism.