Product Description: Moving beyond a survey approach, this collection explores British fiction's place among the cultural shifts and headline events of four distinctive decades. From the collapse of communism, through the rise of Thatcher to the shifts in global power, each volume evaluates the impact of social, cultural and political history on the fiction of the respective period...read more

Product Description: Since the publication of White Teeth in 2000, Zadie Smith has become one of the most popular contemporary writers and also one of the mostly widely studied. Taking criticism of Smith's work beyond its traditional focus on postcolonialism and multicultural identity, Reading Zadie Smith brings together leading international scholars to open up new directions in criticism of Smith's work...read more

Product Description: This book outlines the methodology and results of the Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project, led by a research team from Brunel University, UK. It investigates how older people resist stereotypical cultural representations of ageing and demonstrates the importance of narrative understanding to social agency...read more

Death is indisputably central to Beckett's writing and reception. This collection of research considers a number of Beckett's poems, novels, plays and short stories through considerations of mortality and death. Chapters explore the theme of deathliness in relation to Beckett's work as a whole, through three main approaches. The first of these situates Beckett's thinking about death in his own writing and reading processes, particularly with respect to manuscript drafts and letters. The second on the death of the subject in Beckett links dominant ‘poststructural' readings of Beckett's writing to the textual challenge exemplified by the The Unnamable. A final approach explores psychology and death, with emphasis on deathly states like catatonia and Cotard's Syndrome that recur in Beckett's work. Beckett and Death offers a range of cutting-edge approaches to the trope of mortality, and a unique insight into the relationship of this theme to all aspects of Beckett's literature.

Product Description: Literature and Culture Handbooks are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills...read more

Product Description: This book is an introduction to the work of Zadie Smith that places her fiction in a clear historical, critical and theoretical context, and explores her work in relation to contemporaneity and postcolonialism. Including an interview with the author, this guide offers an accessible reading of Smith's work and an overview of its critical reception...read more

Product Description: Bringing together both established and emerging scholars of the long nineteenth century, literary modernism, landscape and hemispheric studies, and contemporary fiction, "New Versions of Pastoral" offers a historically wide-ranging account of the Bucolic tradition, tracing the formal diversity of pastoral writing up to the present day...read more

Product Description: Writers Talk includes interviews with Kate Atkinson, Pat Barker, Jonathan Coe, Jim Crace, Toby Litt, Graham Swift, Matt Thorne, David Mitchell, AlanWarner, and Will Self."Is it a good time to be a writer in the time of The Da Vinci Code? It's not necessarily good time to be a literary writer...read more

Product Description: The Contemporary British Novel is a lively, wideranging guide to the key issues in writing in Britain since the mid1970s, including social change, gender, sexuality, class, history and ethnicity. Designed to address problems faced by students in the exciting but challenging field of contemporary fiction, the text is organised to focus on major topics including: the changing nature of British identity; the representation of urban identity and urban spaces; class issues including the rise and fall of the middle class; multiracial identity and hybridity...read more

Product Description: Jim Crace is one of the most imaginative of contemporary novelists. The author of nine novels, he has received great public and intellectual acclaim across the UK, Europe, Australia and the United States. Philip Tew's study is the first extended critical examination of Crace's oeuvre and is based on extensive interviews with the novelist, including discussions of his work from his first worldwide bestseller Continent (1986) up to his forthcoming novel, The Pesthouse, to be published in 2007...read more

Product Description: 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. It offers comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of a broad range of selected contemporary authors, drawing together both established and emerging literary voices reflecting the scope of the new British writing...read more

Product Description: This important new book provides a comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, postcolonialism and urban culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This study introduces the prose writing of B.S. Johnson, the British novelist who adapted the experimentalism of the nouveau roman and committed his narratives to a plural and chaotic notion of truth as a literary critique. Philip Tew examines different themes and phases of Johnson's writing, offering new and original interpretations of his work...read more