A History of English Literature

degraded circumstances in which people live their lives, his ‘loaf-haired’ secretary (‘Toads Revisited’, ‘an estateful of washin ...

Ted Hughes The verse ofTed Hughes(1930–1998) shows little of Larkin’s interest in human beings, nor his horrified urbanity or su ...

audience. He has written, translated and adapted a number of theatrical and oper- atic scripts for international companies, and ...

him words are also things, as they were for James Joyce. The inherited presence of a different native tongue, Irish, Gaelic or W ...

intellectuals who had come to power in French universities after 1968 were deter- mined to set aside the traditions of the Frenc ...

Overview The English novel showed new vigour in the 1980s, from writers old and new. As fiction flourishes and poetry shrinks, w ...

Oxford, is not Oxford English but shopping English. As air-transport and electron- ics shrink the world, usage and fashion come ...

Shakespearian English. Giuseppe di Lampedusa visited England to see the houses where its writers had lived, and composed for a y ...

All literature is contemporary Time is full of paradoxes for those who live within it. ‘Contemporary literature’ is now taught i ...

since theatre both reflects and critiques social morality; especially since the rise, a hundred years ago, of the social-problem ...

Theatre and identity Recent radical drama often deals in ‘In Yer Face’ confrontation. Rape, sodomy and madness have been shown o ...

sexual violence; her later plays became increasingly abstract. One tendency of contemporary theatre is advertised in the provoca ...

Victorian word, as Ezra Pound remarked) is real enough: a few artists – Michaelangelo, Mozart, Tolstoy – are universally regarde ...

It came from somewhere beyond the corral. A dwarf on stilts. Another dwarf. I sidled past some trucks. From under a freighter I ...

most representative. There must, in the nature of the exercise, be some omissions; and the findings must reflect the taste of th ...

more serious novels. His reputation remains higher in southern Europe (where he lived) than in Britain, perhaps because of his C ...

The Cement Garden(1978),The Child in Time(1987),The Innocent(1990),Enduring Love(1997),Amsterdam(1998),Atonement(2002),Saturday( ...

(2011), which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction. It is a carefully planned tale which shows in two ways the influence of Fren ...

fatherhood: ‘the pram in the hall’, one of Cyril Connolly’s ‘enemies of promise’ (for a writer). But was Adrian’s suicide, given ...

A.S. Byatt London journalists paid much attention to the three young guns reviewed above. An older novelist,A. S. Byatt(1936– ) ...