Rod Mengham – författare

Henry Green (1905-1974) was the writer of nine technically outstanding novels, and of an autobiographical text. In the role of author he was intensely private, even secretive (Henry Green being a pseudonym), and his strange and heady writings derive their power in some way from their very secretiveness. In this 1982 study, Dr Mengham sets out to uncover the systematic basis of this quality in Green's writing, and to account for it in terms of the 'conditions of knowledge' of each text. Green, he argues, writes to maintain an 'idiom of the time', which constantly renews itself in a critical relation with the changing understanding of what goes to make us up - intellectually, socially, unconsciously. On the one hand, each of Green's books is treated on its own chronological succession; on the other, there is a continuous examination of manuscripts and typescripts making clear the development of certain writing procedures.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to fiction in the English-speaking world during the period from 1970 to the present day. During this period, a sea change has transformed fiction in English, and this collection introduces the key developments as well as the works of some of the most important writers today.

This important new book provides a comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, postcolonialism and urban culture. In a series of lively and accessible essays, key critics introduce a broad range of leading British writers, including Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith. Offering an illuminating analysis and contextualiztion of British fiction today, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary literature.

This important new book provides a comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, postcolonialism and urban culture. In a series of lively and accessible essays, key critics introduce a broad range of leading British writers, including Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith. Offering an illuminating analysis and contextualiztion of British fiction today, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary literature.

The writing of the 1930s is the record of a time dominated by a sense of being caught between different times and places; between two world wars between generations, between modernism and realism, between middle class and working class, between local and national cultures and between national and international politics. British Literature showed more overt engagement with radical politics than ever before or since while also testing the uses and limits of difficulty, encryption and the legacy of modernism. Too often thought of as a period defined by the preoccupations of a handful of prestigious writers, the decade of the 1930s is here re-read in ways that relate these preoccupations to popular cultural emphases as well as to international debates, attending to middlebrow tastes as well as to avant- garde experimentation, and recognizing the significance of regional emphases and issues of gender.

British Fiction Today provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 through a collection of the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction. These essays offer comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of novelists, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of new British writing. Organised around key themes in contemporary writing - Modern Lives, Contemporary Living; Distortions and Dreams; States of Identity and Histories, each section begins with a short introductory essay. Each section includes newly commissioned essays by leading critics on: Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Coe, Jenny Diski, Alan Hollinghurst, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Introducing key works, writers and major themes including post-colonialism, gender and history, this is the ideal guide to British fiction today.

"British Fiction Today" provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 through a collection of the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction. It offers comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of selected contemporary authors, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of the new British writing. Organised around key themes in contemporary writing - Modern Lives, Contemporary Living; Distortions and Dreams; States of Identity and Histories, each section begins with a short introductory essay. Each section includes newly commissioned essays by leading critics on: Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Jonathan Coe, Jenny Diski, Alan Hollinghurst, Toby Litt, Ian McEwan, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson. Introducing key works, writers and major themes including post-colonialism, gender and history, "British Fiction Today" is the ideal guide to the contemporary literary scene for students and readers.

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium.• A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry• Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics• Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets• Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet’s workFrom the Introduction:The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik.All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.

Rod Mengham’s new offering comprises two complementary halves: a poetic meditation on a place (the Bronze Age site of Grimspound on Dartmoor); and a series of short essays on different cultural habitats.Grimspound is a four-part work combining prose and verse, composed on site over the course of ten years. It combines a `wild analysis’ of Hound of the Baskervilles (whose climactic scene takes place at Grimspound), a portrait of the Victorian excavator Sabine Baring-Gould, and a series of poems that draw on the Russian linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky’s experimental Nostratic Dictionary.Inhabiting Art gathers essays on cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, viewed either episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own history and prehistory.