In such novels as Hotel World and the Whitbread Prize winning The Accidental, Ali Smith has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction.
Mary Butts was an important figure in inter-war modernist circles and one who reviewed and associated with some of the major literary figures of the era, from T.
British Fiction Today provides students and readers with a critical introduction to key authors and novels since 1990 and provides the latest critical perspectives on current British fiction.
Ulysses remains less widely read than most texts boasting such a canonical status, largely due to misunderstanding about how to read it, and this guide provides an easy to follow remedy.
This book provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist.
'The foreigner' is a familiar character in popular crime fiction, from the foreign detective whose outsider status provides a unique perspective on a familiar or exotic location to the xenophobic portrayal of the criminal 'other'.
British Fictions of the Sixties focuses on the major socio-political changes that marked the sixties in relationship to the development of literature over the decade.
Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) moves beyond a critical reception of Philip Roth's recent fiction that has focused primarily on an interest in post WWII America.
When an Archbishop of Canterbury takes time off to write a book about Dostoevsky, this is a sign of great hope and encouragement for The Church of England and for all those who seek God.
Dickens, Journalism, Music presents the first full analysis of the articles on music published in the two journals conducted by Charles Dickens, Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round.
This study approaches the fiction of the 1930s through critical debates about genre, language and history, setting these in their original context, and discussing the generic forms most favoured by novelists at the time.
Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel A Handmaid's Tale, engages the reader with a broad range of issues relating to power, gender and religious politics.
From the early years of the nineteenth century, cultural pessimists imagined in fiction the political forces that might bring about the destruction of London.
Introduces the work of James Joyce, the literary, historical and political contexts in which he wrote and his critical reception up to the present day.
From its growth in Europe in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has developed into one of the most popular genres of literature and popular culture more widely.
Readers of Emily Brontë's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary "mystic of the moors".
From David Lean's big screen Great Expectations to AlejandroAmenábar's reinvention of The Turn of the Screw as The Others, adaptations of literary classics are a constant feature of popular culture today.
One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity undertakes the first extensive analysis of the works of Dave Eggers, an author who has grown from a small-time media upstart into one of the most influential author-publishers of the twenty-first century.
From David Lean's big screen Great Expectations to AlejandroAmenábar's reinvention of The Turn of the Screw as The Others, adaptations of literary classics are a constant feature of popular culture today.
There has been a proliferation in recent scholarship of studies of monuments and their histories and of theoretical positions that shed light on aspects of their meanings.
While Dickens's religion and religious thought is recognized as a significant component of his work, no study of Dickens's religion has carefully considered his often ignored, yet crucially relevant, The Life of Our Lord.
Asked in 2006 about the philosophical nature of his fiction, the late American writer David Foster Wallace replied, "e;If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
The first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and translated into thirteen languages, Maggie Gee is writing the Victorian condition-of-England novel for 21st-century Britain.
This collection of critical essays on the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis examines the novels of his mature period: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999), and Lunar Park (2005).