A History of English Literature

Artist of the Floating World(1986). In both, an old man remembers a life in which he has made dubious accommodations with author ...

has a human depth and subtlety not characteristic of the bleak world of much contemporary fiction. Ishiguro’s Japanese family up ...

Penelope Fitzger ald Penelope Fitzgerald The late-flowering Penelope Fitzgerald(1916–2000), must now have a claim to be regarded ...

much’, she wrote in a letter (Julian Barnes,The Guardian, 8 July 2008). I do not know of another novelist who came into the busi ...

Bainbridge’s later novels, more historical and variable, often deal with the puzzled frustration with which the young experience ...

Pat Barker Pat Barker(1943– ) is a writer of a different kind. She came from a broken family in north-eastern England, and her f ...

Salman Rushdie The American statesman Dean Acheson informed a conference at the US Military Academy at West Point in 1962, that ...

of speech, full of popular gusto and broad humour. The opening is arresting, and the scenery and the technique are new; the stru ...

often set in colonial times, eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. In practice, ‘post-colonial’ is not applied t ...

from second-generation immigrants such as Hanif Kureishi. The multi-cultural contribution to current writing in English is incre ...

After British Islamists bombed London in July 2005, attitudes changed. Trevor Phillips, author ofWindrush: The Irresistible Rise ...

seeks sexual encounters with other men, with the approval of the daughter in the house in which he is staying. The way in which ...

Jane Austen, Trollope, Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh, and less good ones of the same authors. There can be few authors whose l ...

this is a drastically secularized account of the English Reformation: the major players in this fiction are not motivated by the ...

Gissings, Ivy Compton-Burnetts or Angela Carters. A genre has rules and recipes, or at least expectations. Just as Shakespeare’s ...

no better than communist brutality, Cornwall, himself a young veteran of ‘intelli- gence’, wrote of ‘moral equivalence’. Darknes ...

Shakespeare was a popular writer, and much in the world’s best writing draws energy from popular genres of the kind encountered ...

Potter’ draws on all the traditions of the children’s book, owing something to each of the names mentioned in the last paragraph ...

abstractly Christian, more humanly embodied, than that of the Inklings. Evil, in JKR’s universe, can be resisted by love, as we ...

A Achebe, Chinua (1930– ) 423, 425 Ackroyd, Peter (1949– ) 381, 411, 428 ‘Adam lay y-bounden’ 67 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719) 7, ...