Literature (American, British, and World)

From Angus Wilson to Pat Barker and Salman Rushdie, British Culture of the Post-War is an ideal starting point for those studying cultural developments in Britain of recent years. Chapters on individual people and art forms give a clear and concise overview of the progression of different genres. They also discuss the wider issues of Britain's relationship with America and Europe, and the idea of Britishness.Each section is introduced with a short discussion of the major historical events of the period. Read as a whole, British Culture of the Postwar will give students a comprehensive introduction to this turbulent and exciting period, and a greater understanding of the cultural production arising from it.

The literature of twentieth-century Britain's final twenty years represents a crash course in transitional history. In the aftermath of the 1970s, the nation's hopes of becoming more efficient were high, leading to the fundamental domestic shake-up that was Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution (1979–90). Following the end of the Cold War, Europe was undergoing radical rejuvenation, while the world as a whole began to thrive on new levels of connectivity and proximity brought through rapid advances in communication technology. Later, in the 1990s, Britons were asked to countenance not only internal devolution, but also the crystallisation of a brand-new European and global order. This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends as well as enduring transitional shifts in genre, tone, style and thematic preoccupation.

This is a unique new reference book to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world - from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age who feature in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English - writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, Henry James - could hardly have imagined how richly diverse "Literature in English" would become by the end of the century. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors.

This important collection of essays both contributes to the expanding field of classical reception studies and seeks to extend it. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, it looks at a range of different genres (epic, novel, lyric, tragedy, political pamphlet). Within the published texts considered, the usual range of genres dealt with elsewhere is extended by chapters on books for children, and those in which childhood and memories of childhood are informed by antiquity; and also by a multi-genre case study of a highly unusual subject, Spartacus. Remaking the Classics also goes beyond books to dramatic performance, and beyond the theatre to radio - a medium of enormous power and influence from the 1920s to the 1960s, whose role in the reception of classics is largely unexplored. The variety of genres and of media considered in the book is balanced both by the focus on Britain in a specific time period, and by an overlap of subject-matter between chapters: the three chapters on twentieth-century drama, for example, range from performance strategies to post-colonial contexts.The book thus combines the consolidation of a field with an attempt to push it in new and exciting directions.

In The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature Ashley Dawson identifies the key British writers and texts, shaped by era-defining cultural and historical events and movements from the period. He provides: Analysis of works by a diverse range of influential authors Examination of the cultural and literary impact of crucial historical, social, political and cultural events Discussion of Britain's imperial status in the century and the diversification of the nation through Black and Asian British Literature Readers are also provided with a comprehensive timeline, a glossary of terms, further reading and explanatory text boxes featuring further information on key figures and events.