Tony Tanner – författare

'And then went down to the ship.' Thus, with a nod to Homer, Ezra Pound began his own epic odyssey through the world of literature and the modern world. There is no literature without a departure, a setting forth; and very often that has meant leaving the land for the more uncertain world of the sea. Many great writers have written about life at sea and the adventures that are to be had, and in this selection of short stories, Tony Tanner's aim was to avoid the obvious and where possible to seek out their more neglected works. As a separate and recognizable genre, the sea story was effectively invented by American writers and they are well represented, with contributions from Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. From Herman Melville(who wrote no short stories) we read his account of the final three days of the chase of Moby Dick, which concludes that novel and is one of the high points in American literature. Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, John Masefield, E. M. Forster, Malcolm Lowry, and Peter Ustinov are some of British authors in this collection. Although not British in origin, the greatest of all writers of sea fiction is Joseph Conrad, the only writer to be represented by two stories: 'Initiation', which begins the volume, and 'The Secret Sharer', in which he charts one of the most extraordinary relationships between men at sea ever imagined and analyzed. In his introduction, Tony Tanner seeks to explore and establish the particular qualities that emerge when writing takes to the waters and we, as readers, are offered what Conrad called his 'paper-boats'. This wide-ranging collection of stories will prove absorbing and thoroughly entertaining reading for anyone with an interest in the sea and its literature.

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the `masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidèle is `the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most `modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Tony Tanner's classic text on Jane Austen addresses the issues that have always occupied the author's most perceptive critics, and offers an illuminating and refreshing analysis of Austen's novels. Tanner shows how Austen changed from a basically accepting view of 'society' to a more questioning one and considers the problems of authority, power and the position of women, as well as the relationship between ethics, language and behaviour.This reissued edition features a new Preface by leading Romantic scholar Marilyn Gaull who examines Tanner's background and places the original work in context. Lively and informative, the Preface helps to reinforce and explain the continued importance of Tanner's work. Accompanied by an insightful Note on the Text by Austen scholar John Wiltshire, and an expanded Bibliography and Index, this is a timely republication of a study which is now regarded as one of the finest, and most accessible, introductions to a great novelist.

Thomas Pynchon is now recognized as a major contemporary novelist and perhaps the most important American writer since Melville. His work is both richly imaginative and amazingly erudite and can be compared, in its complexity, linguistic playfulness and experimentation and wealth of allusion, to the work of James Joyce. Aspects of history, psychology, technology and science, cultural and political movements, problems of identity and society and the status and function of fiction and narrative in the modern world are all dramatized with extraordinary wit and power.Tony Tanner provides a brief, comprehensive introduction to his work. Against the background of Pynchon the man, this book, originally published in 1982, examines in detail his early short stories (some of which are not easily accessible) and offers a guide to the reading of his novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Many of Pynchon’s recurrent themes, from entropy and information theory to his interest in the operations and divisions of power in the world since the Second World War, are considered. Finally, Tony Tanner places Pynchon and his work in a broader cultural and literary context.

Thomas Pynchon is now recognized as a major contemporary novelist and perhaps the most important American writer since Melville. His work is both richly imaginative and amazingly erudite and can be compared, in its complexity, linguistic playfulness and experimentation and wealth of allusion, to the work of James Joyce. Aspects of history, psychology, technology and science, cultural and political movements, problems of identity and society and the status and function of fiction and narrative in the modern world are all dramatized with extraordinary wit and power.Tony Tanner provides a brief, comprehensive introduction to his work. Against the background of Pynchon the man, this book, originally published in 1982, examines in detail his early short stories (some of which are not easily accessible) and offers a guide to the reading of his novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Many of Pynchon’s recurrent themes, from entropy and information theory to his interest in the operations and divisions of power in the world since the Second World War, are considered. Finally, Tony Tanner places Pynchon and his work in a broader cultural and literary context.

The adopted attitude towards reality and experience in American literature tends to be one of wonder and cultivated naivety rather than analysis and judgement. In this book, Dr Tanner offers some reasons for this and seeks to demonstrate the peculiar importance of wonder in American literature, by examining a number of key writers and showing how they confronted and assimilated reality at the same time he considers some of the difficulties incurred by this approach and studies its effects on American style.

This book is about the relationship of the American writer to his land and language - to the 'scene' and the 'sign', to the natural landscape and the inscriptions imposed upon it by men. Among the questions considered in the first section of the book are how does American Romantic writing differ from European; what are the peculiar problems faced by the American artist, and what roles does he adopt to tackle them; what kind of writing results when authors as different as Henry Adams and Mark Twain lament the vanishing of an earlier America, or when Adams and Henry James review their complex relationship to their homeland, or when W. D. Howells and Stephen Crane seek to define their themes in a specifically American setting. The second section of the book examines similar concerns in a number of contemporary writers, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, John DeLillo, and William Gass.

The late Tony Tanner was one of the most distinctive and distinguished critical voices on American literature. His work is familiar to generations of students and scholars, and has helped shape our understanding of the major nineteenth and twentieth century American writers. With a foreword by Edward Said and an introduction by Ian Bell which places Tanner's work in the larger context of critical approaches to American literature and culture in recent years, the book brings together Tanner's essays on a wide range of key American authors. Exploring writers as diverse as Melville, Emerson, Henry James, DeLillo and Pynchon, it offers an introduction to the major figures and themes in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.

Barbara Hardy has concentrated on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, The Jolly Corner and other tales, autobiography, travel and the influential criticism. She has been writing about James since the fifties and draws on long experience of teaching James – to addicts, hostile parodists, and persevering fiction-lovers fascinated by a demandingly extravagant and original novelist. She offers new readings of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James’s theory and practice anticipate. Her close analysis traces generative imaging-making and reflexive story-telling, following two dominant and complementary themes, the social construction of character, and creative imagination: James dramatises the power of environment, to dismiss essentialism and ask the key question ‘What shall we call the self?’; and he is a disturbing analyst of inner life, catching its fantasies, revisions, and speculations in self-referential language. This study of the most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists will interest new and old Jamesians, novel-readers and students at all levels.

When Tony Tanner died in 1998, the world lost a critic who was as sensitive a reader of Jane Austen as he was of Thomas Pynchon, and who wrote with a warmth and clarity that belied his fluency in literary theory. In the final ten years of his life Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on—writing a preface to each of Shakespeare’s plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare’s deployment of complex words in his plays. Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. The Independent said of the project, “All of Tanner’s life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent—both accessible and erudite.”

Originally published in 1979. Adultery is a dominant feature in chivalric literature; it becomes a major concern in Shakespeare's last plays; and it forms the central plot of novels from Anna Karenina to Couples. Tony Tanner proposes that transgressions of the marriage contract take on a special significance in the "bourgeois novels" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His interpretation begins with the general topic of adultery in literature and then zeroes in on three works—Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. His interpretation encompasses the role of women, the structure of the family, social mores, and the history of sexuality.