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142 results in Writers and their Work

Page 4 of 8

Marina Warner
  • Laurence Coupe
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    31 August 2005
  • Warner is such a widely celebrated writer that it is a source of some wonderment that this is the first full-length study of her work. Warner is a novelist whose work is rooted in traditional forms such as legend, romance and fairy tale yet who is wholly contemporary in her thinking. This is a must read for students and fans alike.

Othello
  • Emma Smith
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    31 July 2005
  • Shakespeare's play of 1604 is marked from its outset by a doubleness in its very title 'Othello, or the Moor of Venice'. In this study Emma Smith teases out instances of doubleness, duplication and paradox to discuss the play's language and its themes.

Alfred Tennyson
  • Writers and their Work
  • Seamus Perry
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 December 2019
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005
  • This title is a study of Tennyson's lyrical imagination, describing its complex fascinations with recurrence, progress, narrative, and loss, and its doubts about its own artfulness.

Olive Schreiner
  • Carolyn Burdett
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2005
  • Olive Schreiner, who was born in 1855 in South Africa, has become a central literary figure for thinking about the complex debates surrounding gender, imperialism and class between 1880 and 1920. Aesthetically bold and politically passionate, Schreiner wrote novels, short stories, lyrical fragments she called dreams, as well as non-fiction and political polemic. Her work is widely acknowledged as a significant, though unconventional, contribution to the 'New Woman' debates of the fin de siècle, while her anti-imperialism helped to challenge and reshape feminist thinking. This volume explores Schreiner's contribution to these debates, while also focusing on the shaping influence of both religion and science on her work. It discusses the range of her work, including her novels, The Story of an African Farm, Undine, and From Man to Man; her feminist tract Woman and Labour and short fictions and allegories about the position of women; and her diverse writings about South Africa, her country of birth.

Rosamond Lehmann
  • Judy Simons
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 December 2004
  • Rosamond Lehmann's first book, Dusty Answer (1927), with its scandalous subject matter, made her a literary celebrity at the age of twenty-seven. Seen as the voice of a new generation, she became the centre of an artistic circle that included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Elizabeth Bowen. Lehmann's novels deal with the urgency of romance and the vicissitudes of young women in love, and depict the emotional rollercoaster of romance and the tortuous process of growing up more directly than any writer before her. This book locates Lehmann's fictional achievement in the context of her times and in particular describes its positioning within the turbulent period between two world wars and the changing aesthetic of modernity. It includes a penetrating critical analysis of each of the major works, drawing on previously unpublished private papers, including letters to family and friends. In this it provides fresh and original insights into one of the most celebrated English novelists of her age.

Margaret Drabble
  • Glenda Leeming
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2004
  • Margaret Drabble is a writer whose subject matter and technique have developed profoundly since the early sixties: this book draws together the different aspects of her narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events. The often distanced and ironic narration is discussed, and shown to reinforce Drabble's recurrent themes – themes that include the effect of early family influence and heredity on free choice, the inexorable pressure of social changes, and the role of accident in destabilizing the confident individual. In the later novels people move in a world where they and others may be victims of a callous society, but may equally be guilty of condoning or promoting society's worst trends. This study describes how narrative increasingly becomes ambiguous, offering then withholding support for the behaviour of the characters, and challenging the reader to think again.

James Kelman
  • H. Gustav Klaus
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 August 2004
  • One of the most powerful and provocative writers to have emerged in Britain in recent years, James Kelman has engendered a good deal of controversy over his widely reported, but often misconceived use of 'bad' language words. This introduction to the whole range of his works, from the early short stories through the plays and essays to the Booker Prize winning novel How Late it Was, How Late and the latest experimental fiction, examines the embattled Kelman’s literary politics. H. Gustav Klaus pays close attention to the Scottish culture in which Kelman's writing was nurtured, to the uncompromising treatment of the 'underclass', the intricacies of the narrative voice and the existentialist anguish behind it. A writer of international reputation now, Kelman's principled anti-authoritarianism raises uncomfortable questions about the continuing reality of class, dominant social and literary values and the role of writers in our time.

Women's Gothic
  • From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley
  • E. J. Clery
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2004
  • Female writers of the Gothic were hell-raisers in more than one sense: not only did they specialize in evoking scenes of horror, cruelty, and supernaturalism, but in doing so they exploded the literary conventions of the day, and laid claim to realms of the imagination hitherto reserved for men. They were rewarded with popular success, large profits, and even critical adulation. E.J. Clery's acclaimed study tells the strange but true story of women's gothic. She identifies contemporary fascination with the operation of the passions and the example of the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons as enabling factors, and then examines in depth the careers of two pioneers of the genre, Clara Reeve and Sophie Lee, its reigning queen, Ann Radcliffe, and the daring experimentalists Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre. The account culminates with Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein (1818) has attained mythical status. Students and scholars as well as general readers will find Women's Gothic a stimulating introduction to an important literary mode.

John Dryden
  • David Hopkins
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2004
  • This book is a concise introduction, drawing on the latest research, to the life and work of the most celebrated English poet of the late seventeenth century. It is unusual in stressing not only the poet's responses to events, personalities, and ideas of his day, but also the way in which his work engages (in a far more speculative and pluralistic way than is often supposed) with human issues and dilemmas of permanent concern: the relation of human to animal and inanimate nature; the forces, internal and external which serve to ennoble, enrich and confound human endeavour; the capacities and limits of human reason; the relations between the sexes. Dryden emerges from this study as, simultaneously, 'a man of his times' and a writer with important things to say to us all.

Virginia Woolf
  • Laura Marcus
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2004
  • In the new edition of her highly regarded study, Laura Marcus examines a wide range of Virginia Woolf's novels, short stories, essays and autobiographical writings in the context of themes and topics of central contemporary relevance and interest: time, history and narrative; modernism and the city; gender, sexuality and identity; art and life-writings. As well as exploring her significance for, and contribution to, feminist debates and to definitions of modernism, the book also includes detailed analyses of all Woolf's novels an her non-fiction writings, including 'A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas and the 'biography' Flush. It considers current theoretical approaches to Woolf's work and also engages with Woolf's own cultural contexts, exploring, for example, her responses to war, to Freud's theories, and to early twentieth-century theories of sexuality and gender identity, and the transition from Victorianism to modernity.

Katherine Mansfield
  • Andrew Bennett
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    29 February 2004
  • This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories focusing on the question of the connection between life and writing in her work. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks. The study focuses on the question of the connection between life and writing in Mansfield's work: it explores her engagements with issues of personal identity and elaborates her theory and practice of a poetics of impersonation whereby the identity of the author is merged with those of her characters. Bennett argues that Mansfield's multiple and unstable identities and identifications are bound up with issues of colonialism, nationality, gender, and sexuality, and that they may be said to be embedded within the very texture of her prose. Mansfield's impersonations, in their engagement with a 'queer' aesthetics, with strangeness and surprise, with hatred, with an unsettling of personal identity and with the uncertainties of national and sexual identification, constitute the risk and the achievement of Katherine Mansfield's writing.

John Bunyan
  • Tamsin Spargo
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • John Bunyan (1628-88) lived and wrote through some of the most turbulent years of political, social, and religious change in British history from civil war, through Commonwealth and Protectorate to the Restoration. Imprisoned for unlicensed preaching as a Nonconformist, Bunyan turned to writing to sustain his pastoral mission and composed some of the best-known, and most critically acclaimed, seventeenth-century texts, from his intensely moving spiritual autobiography, Grace bounding to the Chief of Sinners, to the world famous allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's style fused vivid depiction of the everyday world of ordinary men and women with powerful narratives to dramatise his religious convictions. This accessible study of his life, times, and writing introduces all his key works within the contexts of their original moment and later international impact and argues that Bunyan is a writer whose work continues to reward readers of all ages, beliefs, and nationalities.

Sylvia Plath
  • Elisabeth Bronfen
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • In this new edition of her engaging and original study Elisabeth Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath's poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction as well as her autobiographical texts, in the context of the resilient Plath-Legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963 and to which, after over three decades of silence. Ted Hughes responded with his collection of commemorative poems, Birthday letters. Arguing that although we can not sever our reading of Plath's work from the critical and biographical writings about her, the study nevertheless offers close readings of texts to explore the various self-fashionings in poetry and prose. Which this highly ambivalent poet developed. The central theme to which this study returns is Plath's insistence on a clandestine traumatic knowledge of fallibility and fragility underlying the fiction of success, health and happiness so prevalent in post-World War Two, whether expressed as anger and violence, as the celebration of feminine figures of transcendence, or as the quiet dissolution of the subject and its world represented in her late Ariel poems; whether giving voice to the relentless self-absorption of her autobiographical texts or psychic recovery in her autobiographical novel, Plath's struggle with gender and cultural identity is astonishingly timely.

Janet Frame

Philip Larkin
  • Laurence Lerner
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    07 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • Philip Larkin is one of the finest English poets of our time. His poetic personality – nostalgic, wry, melancholy, ironic, witty and haunting – has appealed to a far wider audience than that of literary specialists, while also winning the respect of leading critics and fellow poets. Lerner's study relates poetry to Larkin's life, and to the literary and social environment of post-war Britain; discusses the Larkin persona, and Larkin's relation to literary criticism; and above all seeks to guide readers to a full appreciation of the power and subtlety of Larkin's best poems.

Caryl Phillips
  • Helen Thomas
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • Helen Thomas examines the ways in which Caryl Phillips responds both creatively and critically to the psychological effects of cultural dispersal, racism and economic exploitation in the black Atlantic. Highlighting the continuing negotiations between Britain and its previous colonies, this study demonstrates the ways in which Phillips's fictional and non-fictional work reformulates contemporary and historical traumatic crises and corresponding agents of survival. Phillips's work is discussed not only in terms of critical emphasis upon past events, but also in terms of its vision of a more expansive dimension of collective experience.

Neil Gunn
  • J. B. Pick
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 December 2003
  • Neil Gunn is now generally accepted as the most significant novelist the Highlands of Scotland have produced. This study examines the scope and depth of his work and assesses him as a writer of European stature.

John Keats
  • Kelvin Everest
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2002
  • This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats's major poems and letters, from a perspective which aims to counter the historical emphasis of recent critical work

Middleton and his Collaborators

Harold Pinter
  • Mark Batty
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    03 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 August 2001
  • Harold Pinter is one of the most significant and widely influential living British playwrights. From his early fame as the controversial author of disconcerting, unconventional dramas in the 1960s to the sparse, provocative plays he has offered steadily through the 1980s and 1990s, he has fascinated audiences and critics alike. His work forms a cornerstone of the dramatic literature of the contemporary British stage and has been integrated into the repertories of theatres world-wide. This book offers a critical examination of his dramatic writing over four decades, from The Room (1957) to Celebration (2000), emphasising the worth of the plays as pieces written for performance, investigating their status as dramatic (as opposed to literary) texts.

Page 4 of 8