Understanding Contemporary British Literature – serie

A study of the actor, director, playwright and lyricist, Alan Bennett. Peter Wolfe demonstrates that Alan Bennett's success in many spheres was no fluke, and his theatrical eminence has always been accompanied by awards and professional recognition. His play ""Single Spies"" won the Oliver Award as England's Best Comedy in 1989. The casts of his plays, starting with ""Forty Years On"" in 1968, have included such luminaries as Sir John Gielgud, Sir Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates and Daniel Day Lewis. His screenwriting earned ""The Madness of King George"" a nomination for an Academy Award. This book seeks to illuminate the writer whose instinct for artistic choices has helped him to succeed on his own terms.

This is a discussion of the work of one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's work in the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the 20th century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation. Malcolm offers close readings of McEwan's early short stories, which he recognizes as traditional and conservative in technique despite their shocking subject matter, and all of McEwan's novels. Employing the third novel, ""The Child in Time"", as the fulcrum for his discussion, Malcolm explores the themes of incest, espionage, moral self-flagellation, sexual fixation, political dysfunction, and personal antipathy evident in the other fiction. He illuminates the continuities obscured by the conventional approach to McEwan's fiction and raises the question whether McEwan is a novelist of brilliant fragments or of overall coherence.

Understanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories and non-fiction by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, of 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews and criticism to map the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape - the sociosexual satire of ""Money"" and ""Yellow Dog"", the bold experimentation of ""Time's Arrow"" and ""Night Train"", and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in ""Experience"" and ""Koba the Dread"". Diedrick illustrates how Amis has reshaped the British literary landscape, expanding its stylistic and thematic range while creating forms adequate to the experience of postmodernity. Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son's outlook and writing. Diedrick also identifies two complementary impulses in Amis's work. The first is journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation. Besides analyzing the ways Amis's fiction forges the topical into the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis's considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

Best known for his play ""Noises Off"", Michael Frayn has garnered widespread critical acclaim and a number of literary honors for his work as a journalist, playwright, novelist, philosopher, and translator. Published in 2002, his novel ""Spies"" won the Booker Prize and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize, and he presides as his generation's foremost translator of Anton Chekhov. In this comprehensive assessment of Frayn's varied body of work, Merritt Moseley introduces readers to the accomplishments of one of Britain's most versatile writers. Beginning with Frayn's humorous journalism, which was vital to the ""satire boom"" of the 1960s, Moseley assesses the entirety of the writer's literary contributions, including his works of philosophy and autobiography. One of the first scholars to consider Frayn seriously as a novelist, Moseley provides careful readings of his fiction, including ""The Tin Man"", ""Sweet Dreams"", and ""Headlong"". Moseley also explores Frayn's development as a playwright, beginning in 1970 with the critically panned ""The Two of Us"". From 1970 through 1990, Frayn knew remarkable success for such award-winning plays as ""Alphabetical Order"" and ""Make or Break"", as well as disastrous failure with ""Look Look"". Moseley follows Frayn's career through these highs and lows and beyond to discuss his work for television and the stage, particularly his triumphant recovery with the hit ""Copenhagen"".

Understanding Rita Dove serves as a critical introduction to the poetry of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who was also the first African American poet laureate of the United States. Through close readings of seven poetry collections, Pat Righelato offers detailed analyses of Rita Dove's thematic concerns and artistic development while bringing to light the musical sense of form and expression of history that permeates Dove's work. While underscoring each collection's distinctive identity, Righelato explores the continuities that link volume to volume, from the earliest chapbooks to Dove's most recent collection, ""American Smooth"". Charting Dove's evolution as a poet, Righelato begins with ""The Yellow House on the Corner"" to identify motifs of the mythical, historical, familial, and autobiographical that have become the writer's artistic capital. Dove brings African American experience to the mainstream of American poetry in ""Thomas and Beulah"" and ""On the Bus with Rosa Parks"". Righelato positions Dove as a successor to Robert Lowell in that her preoccupation with family history is exemplary of American culture. Righelato also argues for viewing Dove as markedly international. In particular Righelato illuminates Dove's affinity with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a feminist reading of ""Mother Love"", a volume written in respectful engagement with his Sonnets to Orpheus.

Beth Henley remains best known for ""Crimes of the Heart"", a play that won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and later was made into a major motion picture. In this introduction to the Mississippi-born playwright and her body of work, Robert J. Andreach presents Henley's plays as a unified whole, considering both her more accessible work of the 1980s and the commonly misunderstood - and often overlooked - plays of the 1990s. Andreach fills the gap in scholarship about the later plays and, in doing so, argues that they recast familiar themes, images, and motifs into new modes of self-discovery and expression. Andreach concedes that differences in setting and style separate the two decades of Henley's career: the plays from the earlier decade comprise single, representational sets in the Deep South of Mississippi and Louisiana while the plays from the 1990s are multiple, symbolic sets in Southern California and other locations. He contends, however, that whether dramatizing naturalistically or experimentally, Henley does not stray far from her original concerns. Andreach points out that while the self-discoveries of the two decades differ, Henley's goal is the same: characters who prove themselves worthy in a culture that denigrates them. Andreach's analysis features close readings of Henley's entire corpus. He positions her final three works of the 1990s as a trilogy that reconciles differing modes of self-discovery.

Understanding Will Self introduces readers to the satire and expressive ingenuity of a British writer who has garnered an array of awards since the 1991 publication of his first short story collection, ""The Quantity Theory of Sanity"". In this guide to the well-received but largely unstudied writer, M. Hunter Hayes examines the key themes, narrative strategies, and cultural commentaries that characterize Self's work. Through close textual analyses, Hayes guides readers through the alternative universe of Self's writing and maps the interplay between his forays into journalism and fiction. Marked by their combination of seemingly improbable events and quotidian details, Self's novels, novellas, and short stories examine contemporary English life through a mode of writing that he has aptly termed ""dirty magical realism."" Hayes shows how recurring characters have evolved through successive works and in relation with their environments. He places Self's writing within its historical and critical contexts and uses each chapter to address either a single work or a group of closely connected works. Hayes' analyses range from well-regarded novels to notable yet uncollected short stories and draw upon secondary critical texts to reassess Self's critical standing.

This is a comprehensive guide to the life and work of the author of ""The Remains of the Day"".One of the most closely followed British writers of his generation, the Japanese-born, English-raised and -educated Ishiguro is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, including ""A Pale View of Hills"" (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature), ""An Artist of the Floating World"" (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award), ""The Remains of the Day"" (1988, Booker Prize), and ""The Unconsoled"" (1995, Cheltenham Prize). Ishiguro's reputation also extends beyond the world of English-language readers. His work has been translated into twenty-seven foreign languages, and the feature film version of ""The Remains of the Day"" was nominated for eight Academy Awards.Brian W. Shaffer's study reveals Ishiguro's novels to be intricately crafted, psychologically absorbing, hauntingly evocative works that betray the author's grounding not only in the literature of Japan but also in the great twentieth-century British and Irish masters - Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce - as well as in Freudian psychoanalysis. All of Ishiguro's novels are shown to capture first-person narrators in the intriguing act of revealing - yet also of attempting to conceal beneath the surface of their mundane present activities - the alarming significance and troubling consequences of their past lives.

This is a telling assessment of the divergent works of a daring British writer. ""Understanding Julian Barnes"" surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes' distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes' greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes' fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue surrounding his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

A dominant figure of postwar British literature, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) wrote more than twenty-five novels, a collection of poems, and a half-dozen philosophical studies..In Understanding Iris Murdoch, Cheryl Bove divides Murdoch's work into two broad categories--the ironic tragedy and the bittersweet comedy--to examine the reasons why her work continues to attract such a large following. A writer of consistently readable novels who fashions gripping narratives and vivid characters, Murdoch presents readers with moral problems upon which she allows her audience to pass judgment. Bove summarizes Murdoch's work not as an effort to advance a cause, expand a philosophy, or portray a society, but to present human relationships and solve fictional problems of plot and theme.

Graham Greene (1904-1991) was one of England's most distinguished authors and to this day has a worldwide audience for his works. He was a powerful voice for human rights in places such as Latin America, South Africa, Haiti, and Vietnam and a relentless analyst of the inner moral conflicts that beset people as they deal with problems common to all human existence. Understanding Graham Greene provides a clear, succinct guide to the major writings of Greene's career, such as It's a Battlefield, England Made Me, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and Travels with My Aunt. Throughout this volume R. H. Miller explores the merits of each selection and delineates how it represents Greene's overarching concerns with civil liberties. Such analysis provides a moral pathway by which readers can explore the many aspects of Greene's art. Also included are studies of Greene's plays, stories, and essays, as well as a selected bibliography of Greene's books and criticisms of his work.

In Understanding Jonathan Coe, the first full-length study of the British novelist, Merritt Moseley surveys a writer whose experimental technique has become increasingly well received and critically admired. Coe is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Priz du Meilleur Livre Entranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for Fiction, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. His oeuvre includes eleven novels and three biographies--two of famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and one of English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson.Following an introductory overview of Coe's life and career, Moseley examines Coe's complex engagement with popular culture, his experimental technique, his political satire, and his broad-canvased depictions of British society. Though his first three books, An Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, and The Dwarves of Death, received little notice upon publication, Moseley shows their strengths as literary works and as precursors. In 1994 Coe gained visibility with What a Carve Up!, which has remained his most admired and discussed novel. He has since published a postmodern take on sleep disorders and university students, The House of Sleep; a two-volume roman-fleuve consisting of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle; a touching account of a lonely woman's life, The Rain before It Falls; a satiric vision of a misguided life, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim; and a domestic comedy thriller set at the 1958 world's fair in Brussels, Expo '58. Moseley explicates these works and discusses the recurring features of Coe's fiction: political consciousness, a deep artistic concern with the form of fiction, and comedy.

Best known for her Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which were adapted into the BBC television series Case Histories, Kate Atkinson is the author of eleven novels, two plays, and a collection of short stories. Her literary awards include the 1995 Whitbread Award for a first novel and book of the year for Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the Costa Book Awards for best novel in 2013 and 2015 for Life after Life and A God in Ruins.In this first book-length study of Atkinson's literary career, Brian Diemert examines the evolution of her novels: the playful and self-conscious work of the 1990s, the detective series novels, the books that examine Britain's history and its legacy of conflict and trauma related to World War II, and the most recent return to mystery. Diemert identifies her pattern of weaving multiple narrative strands into intricate plots that create the mystery at the heart of all her tales. He traces her development of narrative technique and thematic preoccupations of women's vulnerability within patriarchy and the complications of absent or disengaged parents. While her fiction is marked by allusiveness and humor, it remains profound and often touching as it explores the myths of British history and, particularly, women's lives.

Explores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.

Explores seven startling paradoxes behind the bestselling novelist's lasting popularity Agatha Christie stands as the bestselling novelist of all time and, in terms of total sales in all genres, places only behind the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Since the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Christie's fiction has withstood the envy of her peers and the snipes of critics, while garnering the admiration of countless readers. From her puzzling persona (notably in her eleven-day disappearance in 1926) and status as "Queen of the Cozies" to her tragicomic themes and critiques of Englishness, Christie built a lasting literary legacy that perplexes and pleases her hordes of readers. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh takes a fresh look at the contemporary world's most popular author, investigating seven notable paradoxes behind her lasting success, thereby illuminating the literary innovations that have contributed to her uncannily timeless appeal.