Lord Gnome's Literary Companion
Lord Gnome's Literary Companion

Author: Francis Wheen

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9781859840450

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His review has got to be 'in' by mid-day tomorrow ... at about 9 pm his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit ... skipping expertly through one book after another and laying each one down with the comment, 'God, what tripe!' ... Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases--'a book that no one should miss', 'something memorable on every page'--jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet. Thus did George Orwell, writing forty years ago in Confessions of a Book Reviewer, describe the labours of a typical literary hack. Precious little has changed over the intervening decades; the servility of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Lord Gnome's Literary Companion assembles, in thematic order, the best of these columns to present an astringent, rude and funny survey of publishers and the published.

H, V., & O
H, V., & O

Author: Sandie Byrne

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1998-07-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780719052958

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'The dead travel fast and, in our contemporary globalised world, so too does the gothic.' Examining how gothic has been globalised and globalisation made gothic, this collection of essays explores an emerging globalgothic that is simultaneously a continuation of the western tradition and a wholesale transformation of that tradition which expands the horizons of the gothic in diverse new and exciting ways.Globalgothic contains essays from some of the leading scholars in gothic studies as well as offering insights from new scholars in the field. The contributors consider a wide range of different media, including literary texts, film, dance, music, cyberculture, computer games, and graphic novels. This book will be essential reading for all students and academics interested in the gothic, in international literature, cinema, and cyberspace.

Howard Jacobson´s Novels in the Context of Contemporary British Jewish Literature
Howard Jacobson´s Novels in the Context of Contemporary British Jewish Literature

Author: Anténe, Petr

Publisher: Palacky University Olomouc

Published:

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 8024456532

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The novelist Howard Jacobson, who received the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, has often been characterized as the ""British Philip Roth"",although he himself prefers to be viewed as the ""Jewish Jane Austen"". This monograph concludes that both comparisons may be used to comment on various features of Jacobson's oeuvre. Like Roth, Jacobson tends to focus on male Jewish protagonists and intimate relations between the sexes. Like Austen, he portrays a certain social class, whether it be the British Jewish minority or the social world of British writers and university professors. Apart from reflecting on the tension between Britishness and Jewishness as inseparable aspects of his characters' identities, Jacobson's novels contribute to the traditions of British and Jewish humour.

The American Popular Novel After World War II
The American Popular Novel After World War II

Author: David Willbern

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2013-03-29

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1476602484

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Through the perspectives of selected best-selling novels from the end of World War II to the end of the 20th century--including The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, Jaws, Beloved, The Silence of the Lambs, and Jurassic Park--this book examines the crucial issues the U.S. was experiencing during those decades. These novels represent the voices of popular conversations, as Americans considered issues of family, class, racism and sexism, feminism, economic ambition, sexual violence, war, law, religion and science. Through the windows of fiction, the book surveys the Cold War and anti-communism, the prefeminist era of the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1970s, forms of corporate power in the 1960s and 1980s, the traumatic legacies of slavery and Vietnam, the American fascination with lawyers, cops and criminals, alternate styles of romance in the era of late capitalism, our abiding distrust of science, and our steadfast wonder about the Great Mysteries.

A History of the Booker Prize
A History of the Booker Prize

Author: Merritt Moseley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1000433412

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In this book, Merritt Moseley offers a brief history of the Booker Prize since 1992. With a short chapter covering each year, we follow the change in criteria, the highs and lows, short lists, winners, and controversies of the Booker Prize. The book also functions as an example of literary criticism for each of the books involved, analyzing the judging process and the winning books. Exploring themes such as literary vs. popular fiction, the role of Postcolonial work in what began as a very "British" prize, the role of marketing, publishing, and the Booker organization itself, the book offers a crucial view into literary prize culture. The book spends time looking at exclusions, as well as the overall role and function of the literary prize. What books aren’t included and why? Why has the Booker become so significant? This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in, or studying, contemporary literature, literary prizes, literary culture and British literature, as well as publishing studies.

Understanding Julian Barnes
Understanding Julian Barnes

Author: Merritt Moseley

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9781570031403

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Assesses the divergent works of a daring English writer.

Karl Marx
Karl Marx

Author: Francis Wheen

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9780393321579

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Looks at the life of the father of Communism focusing primarily on the human side of the man rather than his works.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

Author: Francis Wheen

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2005-07-06

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0786723521

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What characterizes our era? Cults, quacks, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, that's what. In How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Francis Wheen brilliantly laments the extraordinary rise of superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria. From Middle Eastern fundamentalism to the rise of lotteries, astrology to mysticism, poststructuralism to the Third Way, Wheen shows that there has been a pervasive erosion of Enlightenment values, which have been displaced by nonsense. And no country has a more vivid parade of the bogus and bizarre than the one founded to embody Enlightenment values: the USA. In turn comic, indignant, outraged, and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World is a masterful depiction of the absurdity of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975
The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975

Author: Clare Hanson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1137477369

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This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

British Novelists Since 1960
British Novelists Since 1960

Author: Merritt Moseley

Publisher: Dictionary of Literary Biograp

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13:

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Contains biographical sketches of representative British novelists whose work began to appear roughly around 1960.