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142 results in Writers and their Work

Page 1 of 8

Iris Murdoch
  • Anne Rowe
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    08 July 2020
    Print publication:
    31 May 2019
  • Iris Murdoch was both a popular and intellectually serious novelist, whose writing life spanned the latter half of the twentieth century. A proudly Anglo-Irish writer who produced twenty-six best-selling novels, she was also a respected philosopher, a theological thinker and an outspoken public intellectual. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes that characterise her fiction decade by decade, explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist, explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction. While Iris Murdoch is acknowledged here as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, she is also presented as a figure whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology has immense resonance for twenty-first-century readers.

Kazuo Ishiguro
  • 3rd edition
  • Cynthia F. Wong
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 October 2022
    Print publication:
    04 March 2019
  • In 2017 the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Kazuo Ishiguro, 'who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world'. Cynthia Wong's classic study first appeared in 2000 and is now updated in an expanded third edition that analyses all of Ishiguro's remarkable novels and one short story collection. From his eloquent trilogy - A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, and The Remains of the Day - to the astonishing speculative fiction, Never Let Me Go, and the ambitious fable-like story from pre-Mediaeval times, The Buried Giant, Wong appraises Ishiguro's persistently bold explorations and the narrative perspectives of his troubled characters. A compassionate author, Ishiguro examines the way that human beings reinterpret worlds from which they feel estranged. All of his works are eloquent expressions of people struggling with the silence of pain and the awkward stutters of confusion and loss. This book analyses his subtle and ironic portrayals of people in 'emotional bereavement' and it situates Ishiguro as an empathetic international writer.

Edward Lear

Alan Ayckbourn
  • Michael Holt
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    27 November 2019
    Print publication:
    17 August 2018
  • Alan Ayckbourn is, after Shakespeare, Britain's most performed playwright and acknowledged as one of its most skilful directors. In 50 years he has written more than seventy plays and directed three times that number emerging as a formidable dramatist of international renown. Dismissed at first as a "mere boulevadier", he is now seen as an outstanding modern comic playwright, exploring themes of social and political importance with a bleak eye and a capacity to construct comedy out of the experience of the middle class audience. This book explores the range of his work which covers light comedy, farce, theatrical cartoon, musicals and plays for children. It defines the early influences and the developing themes, concentrating on Ayckbourn's technical skills and his challenges to Aristotelian unities. It traces the playwright's journey from observer of middle class dilemmas through moral and ethical commentator, and on to his concentration on fantasist behaviour and the nature of long term relationships. The comic eye which lies at the heart of this work is explored as a product of both dramatic technique and theatrical experiment.

W.G. Sebald

Penelope Fitzgerald
  • Hugh Adlington
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 July 2018
  • Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) has been acclaimed as one of the finest British novelists of the late twentieth century. Four of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and one of them, Offshore (1979), won; her final work of historical fiction, The Blue Flower (1995), won the US National Book Critics' Circle Award. Fitzgerald's works are distinguished by their acute wit, deft handling of emotional tone and an unsentimental yet deeply felt commitment to portraying the lives of those men, women and children 'who seem to have been born defeated'. Admirers have long recognised the brilliance of Fitzgerald's writing, yet the deceptive simplicity of her style invariably leads readers to ask, 'How is it done?' This book seeks to answer that question, providing the first sustained exposition of Penelope Fitzgerald's compositional method, working both inwards from the surface of her writing and outwards from the archival evidence of Fitzgerald's own drafts and working papers.

Jack London
  • Kenneth K. Brandt
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    31 May 2018
  • Recounting his 1897-98 Klondike Gold Rush experience Jack London stated: "It was in the Klondike I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine." This study explores how London's Northland odyssey - along with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a hardscrabble youth in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an acute craving for social justice - launched the literary career of one of America's most dynamic 20th-century writers. The major Northland works - including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and "To Build a Fire" - are considered in connection with the motifs of literary Naturalism, as well as in relation to complicated issues involving imperialism, race, and gender. London's key subjects—the frontier, the struggle for survival, and economic mobility—are examined in conjunction with how he developed the underlying themes of his work to engage and challenge the social, political, and philosophical revolutions of his era that were initiated by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and others.

Evelyn Waugh
  • Ann Pasternak-Slater
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 July 2016
  • Everyone knows how funny Evelyn Waugh is. One of his finest comic creations was his own increasingly rebarbative public persona – a self-confessed 'front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass'. No wonder new biographies of Waugh are popular. The life and work cannot be separated. Gathered productively a he writer's desk are the chaotic and often bizarre details of Waugh's own life, what he called the 'adroit jigsaw' of his unobtrusively elegant aesthetic structures, and his moral coherence. This study shows how Waugh transformed his own experiences into painfully comic, brilliantly constructed novels. They are works, in his own words, of 'elegance and variety of contrivance'. Ann Pasternak Slater has written an ingenious and engaging study of the relationship between Waugh's life and work, between his sharp moral vision and Dionysiac comic genius. She focuses on Waugh's entire fictional oeuvre in a book notable for its intelligent sympathy

Basil Bunting
  • Julian Stannard
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    27 November 2019
    Print publication:
    01 November 2015
  • The act of poetry is never free from risk; this study shows how Bunting remained faithful to his calling, notwithstanding the twists and turns of his extraordinary life, and he left in his wake an extraordinary body of poetry.

Poets of the Second World War
  • Rory Waterman
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 May 2015
  • An overview of the English-language poetry of the Second World War, focusing on five of the most remarkable poets of that conflict: Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Karl Shapiro, Sidney Keyes and Charles Causley.

W. B. Yeats
  • Edward Larrissy
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    20 February 2015
  • This book not only introduces the reader to contemporary themes in Yeats criticism, but also provides a unified interpretation based on Yeats' ambivalent sense of identity as a nationalist conscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition from which he claimed descent.

Robert Louis Stevenson
  • David Robb
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 December 2014
  • The book is a survey of the range and variety of Stevenson's fiction, from the start to the finish of his short career as a writer. It seeks to emphasise the originality, unexpectedness and liveliness of his stories, without seeking to impose any narrow interpretative slant.

Beryl Bainbridge
  • Huw Marsh
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    27 November 2019
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014
  • This is a concise, analytical discussion of Bainbridge's novels, their subtle and complex treatment of the past and their significance to the post-war canon.

Doris Lessing
  • Elizabeth Maslen
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 December 2019
    Print publication:
    31 August 2014
  • This new edition of Elizabeth Maslen's successful study covers the full range of Doris Lessing's work and explores in detail both its form and content. From The Grass is Singing (1950) through to Alfred and Emily (2008) her main concerns are shown to have a remarkable continuity, both in her commitment to political and cultural issues and in her explorations of inner space. Her experiments with form are closely analysed, and her bold exposure of jargon, cliché, and the manipulative power of language is demonstrated. While she can be seen as part of the great diasporaic influx that followed World War Two her experimentations with form blend in with the explorations of realism taking place in much British fiction from the early years of the twentieth century. This is a concise, accessible, but scholarly book, offering both perceptive critical insights and a valuable up-to-date bibliography.

Pre-Raphaelitism: Poetry and Painting
  • Lindsay Smith
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 August 2013
  • The book offers a major re-assessment of the interrelationship of poem to painting, verbal to visual, in an aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Crime Fiction
  • From Poe to the Present
  • Martin Priestman
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 July 2013
  • This brief study surveys British and American crime fiction from the first detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the present day, exploring the ways in which Poe's basic form has intertwined with more suspense-driven elements to produce fiction featuring spies, private-eyes and serial killers, as well as the classic whodunnit.

Revolutionary Women Writers
  • Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams
  • Angela Keane
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2013
  • In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were at the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by the time he got there). By the end of the decade Smith and Williams were being cited together more pejoratively, as two of a number of women who came to stand for the amoral, sexually suspect and politically naïve English 'Jacobins,' who were vilified in the conservative press. Neither were in fact 'Jacobins,' but they were revolutionary. This book looks at how Smith and Williams earned such reputations and at the politics and poetics of the works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed Romantic and Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise.

Jean Rhys
  • Helen Carr
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2012
  • Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by Dominican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminism and postcolonial theory, and places Rhys's work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. First published in 1996, Helen Carr's revised edition takes full cognizance of the wide critical attention paid to Rhys since that date.

George Meredith
  • Phyllis Bartlett
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 September 2012
  • This study analyses and contextualizes Meredith's more widely read works, bringing out both the scale of his achievement and his relevance for modern readers.

Pre-Romantic Poetry
  • Vincent Quinn
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 August 2012
  • Focusing on poets such as Thomas Gray and William Cowper, Pre-Romantic Poetry investigates pastoral poetry and literary patronage in ways that shift prevailing notions of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic poetry.

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