Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Sylvia Plath's best-known collection of poetry, published posthumously in 1965. Although her preceding volume, The Colossus (1960), was accorded a favourable reception, the magnitude of her poetic talent was not apparent until Ariel appeared. Its forty poems, mostly in precisely cadenced stanzaic free verse, display remarkable technical assurance; an abundance of acutely vivid visual and tactile i…
British novelist, the son of an Armenian merchant; he was born in Roustchouk, Bulgaria, but grew up in Britain from 1901 onward, and was educated at Malvern College and Edinburgh University. Having begun publishing his fiction as ?Michael Arlen? he assumed that name when he took British nationality in 1922. Edmund Goose recommended the publication of The London Venture (1920), his first novel. His…
Ghanaian novelist and journalist, born in Takoradi, educated at the University of Ghana at Legon, and at Harvard. He worked as a scriptwriter and teacher in Ghana, and was editor and translator for Jeune Afrique in Paris. His first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born (1968), was a bleak, vitriolic attack on widespread corruption in Ghanaian life as he saw it, its title borrowed from a sloga…
a novel by Norman Mailer, published in 1968. The novel is Mailer's on-the-spot report of the huge 1967 march on the Pentagon proclaiming against the Vietnam War, which plays off political protest against private satire and comedy. In exploring the relation of fiction to history, he employs a mode of fictionalized journalism known as the ?new journalism?. The novel has a strictly defined sense of p…
a play by John Arden, first performed in 1964. Set in the Scotland of the early sixteenth century and subtitled ?an exercise in diplomacy?, it mainly concerns the conflict between Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, James V's tutor and chief herald, and Johnny Armstrong of Gilnockie. The former, ?ane very subtle practiser?, undertakes to tame the latter, a wild freebooter whose cross-border raids are …
American novelist, born in Wayne County, Kentucky, educated at the University of Louisville. Her writing career began with the publication of The Mountain Path (1936), followed by The Hunter's Horn (1949), the second volume of what was to be known as the Kentucky Trilogy. The Dollmaker (1954), the trilogy's final volume, remains her most celebrated work, and is widely considered a minor American c…
the second and most successful of the dramatic works by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, published in 1936, the others being The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and On the Frontier (1938); all combine verse and prose. It was first produced in 1937 by the Group Theatre, with music by Benjamin Britten. The narrative is based on Britain's imperialist interest in the conquest of F6, a mountain on th…
American poet, born in Rochester, New York, educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. After working as a publisher's copywriter in New York, from 1960 to 1965 he lived in Paris. He wrote art criticism for various periodicals, including Art News, of which he became editor upon returning to New York. From 1974 to 1990 he was Professor of English at Brooklyn College, New York. His early collecti…
New Zealand novelist and educationalist, born in Stratford, a small town in the farming area of Taranki, educated at Teachers' College in Auckland. An educational innovator who taught predominantly Maori children in small rural communities, such as Hawkes and Bay of Plenty, Ashton-Warner utilized her personal theory of a ?key vocabulary? as a means of releasing the creative energies of her student…
is usually centred on the identities of Americans of Asian descent in the context of their immigration histories beginning in 1850 with immigrants from China. Japanese immigrants began to arrive in 1885, followed in the early 1900s by immigrants from South Korea, South Asia, and the Philippines. These periods of immigration occurred in response to shortages of labour in the USA and ended with legi…
a novel by William Faulkner, published in 1930. Faulkner's fifth novel, and one of his greatest, it tells the story of Addie Bundren and the ordeals of her husband and children, after her death, as they transport her body in its coffin to the family plot in Jefferson, Mississippi for burial. In the course of their almost epic journey her husband, Anse, her children, Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell, Jewel, …
American author, born in Petrovichi, Russia; he grew up in New York, where he was educated at Columbia University. In 1949 he began his academic career at Boston University Medical School, where he later became Professor of Biochemistry. Throughout the 1940s his science fiction stories appeared in American magazines. The ?Three Laws of Robotics?, forbidding robots to harm human beings, which had w…
a novel by Bernard Malamud, published in 1957. A naturalistic novel, it focuses upon a Jewish grocer, Morris Bober, whose attempts to eke out a decent living in a small shop in New York are constantly running into failure. The Gentile Italian small-time thief Frankie Alpine holds up the shop and then, stricken with guilt, returns to act as Bober's assistant. After a period of despising Bober's pat…
Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in Brisbane, educated at the University of Queensland. She worked as a school-teacher in Queensland and in New South Wales, then taught at Sydney's Macquarie University (1968?80). Her fiction shrewdly examines the vanities of social existence through a complex tension between perceptive and insensitive characters, and always with a wry humour and al…
a periodical devoted to literature, art, and science founded in 1828 by J. S. Buckingham, who was succeeded as editor in 1830 by Charles Dilke, under whose direction it became the best-selling weekly magazine of its kind. Charles Lamb, W. S. Landor, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, and Walter Pater were among the contributors who established its reputation for the quality of its critical commentar…
American novelist, born in San Francisco, educated in private schools in California and Kentucky. Atherton's reputation has grown increasingly, due to the critical preoccupation with American women's writing, and a renewed interest in the literature of the Far West. Her first work of fiction, What Dreams May Come, appeared in 1888 but her best work dates from the turn of the century. The Californi…
Flann O'Brien's first novel, published in 1939. Graham Greene, then a publisher's reader, recommended its acceptance, noting O'Brien's attempt ?to present, simultaneously, as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland?. The book is strongly informed by the author's familiarity with Gaelic literature; The Madness of Sweeney, a long Middle Irish poem whose hero is cursed with peripatetic derang…
Canadian novelist, poet, and critic, born in Ottawa, educated at the University of Toronto, and at Radcliffe College. After an early collection of poems, Double Persephone (1961), the highly acclaimed collection The Circle Game (1966) established Atwood as one of her generation's foremost Canadian poets, matched by a reputation as an outspoken feminist critic. Her first novel, The Edible Woman (19…
British poet, born in York, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1928 an edition of twenty of his poems was handprinted by Stephen Spender, who, with Louis MacNeice and C. Day Lewis, was among his acquaintances as a student. The great stylistic originality of the collection owed much to his success in assimilating aspects of poetic Modernism while retaining affinities with more traditional modes.…
American novelist, born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Columbia University. His The New York Trilogy (1987) was widely praised for its post-modernist deconstruction of fictional modes?in particular, that of the detective story?and for its lyrical and allusive style. The first novel in the series, City of Glass (1985), uses the detective story form to explore themes of identity and the relation…
British philosopher, born in Lancaster, educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1952 until his death. A writer and lecturer of uncommon with and style, Austin's characteristic approach involved applying the rigour of classical textual scholarship to ?ordinary language?. During his lifetime, his work was mostly disseminated through a few lear…
American novelist, born in Carlinville, Illinois, educated at Blackborn College. In 1888 she moved to California to live on the fringes of the Mojave Desert, where she remained for over twenty years. The Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Flock (1906) vividly celebrate the region's landscape and indigenous culture, which pervade the historical novel Isidro (1905) and the short stories of The Baske…
an autobiography by Gertrude Stein, published in 1933. The autobiography, written as though the author were her private secretary, Alice B. Toklas (also her lifelong companion and lover), is important not so much for what it tells us about Gertrude Stein's life as for its evocation of American expatriate life in Paris and its occasionally philosophical commentary on twentieth-century culture. Unli…
Canadian poet, born in Galt, Ontario, educated at the University of Toronto, where she began working in administrative capacities in 1945. In 1968 she joined the staff of an evangelical mission in Toronto. Winter Sun (1960), her first volume of poetry, was widely acclaimed for the assured suppleness with which she sustained imaginative interactions of factual detail and abstract meditation. The bl…
Ghanaian poet and novelist, born at Wheta in the Volta Region, educated at the University of Ghana. Before moving to London in 1967, he was Director of the Ghana Film Corporation. He taught both at the University of London, and at the Stony Brook campus of New York State University, where he became Chairman of Comparative Literature. On release from prison for an alleged connection with an attempt…
British playwright, born in London, the son of a musician and (his mother having remarried) stepson of a bank manager. He spent his formative years ?plumb centre of where I write about now?, in company flats in small towns in south-east England. After working as an actor, he had four plays produced at the Theatre-in-the-Round in Scarborough, where he became artistic director in 1971 and where he p…
English philosopher, born in London, educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford; he also spent some time at the University of Vienna. He lectured at Oxford from 1933, became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, in 1946, and Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford in 1959. His highly influential first book, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), offered a sy…
British poet, born in Stanford-in-the-Vale, Oxfordshire; upon leaving school at 15, she entered the Civil Service and afterwards served in the Women's Royal Air Force for four years, where she discovered her talent to amuse. After readings of her light verse on Radio Oxford and an appearance on the television programme Opportunity Knocks in 1975, she rapidly became highly popular for her wryly sel…
a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1922. The novel created a major controversy with its uncompromising assault on American virtue. The stereotypical, moral, small-town American businessman George Babbitt epitomizes the ethos of the Mid-western city Zenith. The first seven chapters retain Lewis's original idea to follow Babbitt through the events of one day. Subsequent chapters present set pie…
American critic, born in Dayton, Ohio, educated at Harvard, where he held a professorship from 1912 until his death. The vigorous defence of the humanities in Literature and the American College (1908), his first major work, proved controversial for its harsh critique of the ethos of scientific progress which prevailed in American universities. The breadth of his cultural interests was passed on t…
a play by G. B. Shaw, first performed in 1922; it is its author's most complete dramatization of his theory of ?creative evolution?. Subtitled ?a metabiological pentateuch?, it opens in the Garden of Eden, where Eve is confronted with a serpent who teaches her the facts of life and death and shares its evolutionary hopes: ?You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you cre…
British novelist and playwright, born in Rochester; she spent her childhood in Jamaica, and was educated at Prior Field, Godalming, a progressive English boarding school. She became a student of Walter Sickert and later worked as a journalist for Frank Harris with whom she had an affair. A Diary Without Dates (1917), recording her experiences as an ambulance driver during the First World War, form…
Australian novelist, born in Adelaide. He lived in Britain, Europe, and India for several years and was a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement amongst other literary journals. The stories collected in Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975), republished as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories (1986), were experimental in style and satirical in theme; the title story of the latter vo…
British novelist, short-story writer, and critic, born in Kent, educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her short stories have been published in magazines ranging from Science Fantasy to Bananas, and she edited New Worlds from 1973 to 1975. Her first novel, Polly Put the Kettle On (1975), was a lively portrait of the 1960s; a sequel, As Time Goes By (1988), brings its characters into the 1980s. Am…
British novelist and critic, born in London, and trained as an actor. He earned critical recognition for his first novel, At the Jerusalem (1967), a poignant and lively study of old people in a private institution. Trespasses (1970) followed, in which Bailey explores the disintegration of the persona under the pressures exerted by social conventions. Formally, Trespasses is mimetic of the fracture…
British novelist, born in Liverpool and educated at the Merchant Taylor's School. She began her career as an actress in a Liverpool repertory company. Her first novel, A Weekend With Claude (1967), written in her distinctive laconic style, is a blackly comic account of a weekend in the country which ends with the accidental shooting of one of the protagonists. Her other novels include Another Part…