Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a verse-play by T. S. Eliot, first produced in 1949 and published in 1950. Beginning and ending at a London cocktail party, the play traces the spiritual fortunes of Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne and the former's mistress, Celia Coplestone. Central to the thematic development is the presence of the uninvited guest who is later revealed to be the eminent psychiatrist Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly; th…
South African novelist, born in Cape Town, and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Texas. Dusklands (1974) consists of two novellas (?The Vietnam Project? and ?The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee?); madness and hunger for power on the part of both protagonists, one a technocrat obsessed by the Vietnam war, and the other a Boer patriarch on the verge of paranoia, are at the heart of both. Hi…
Canadian poet, born in East Centreville, New Brunswick, and educated at the Universities of New Brunswick and Edinburgh. He subsequently followed an academic career at the University of New Brunswick, where he edited the influential magazine Fiddlehead and founded Fiddlehead Books, both of which made enormous contributions to the development of Canadian Maritime writing. His first collection of po…
Canadian poet, novelist, and composer-singer, born in Montreal, educated at McGill University under Louis Dudek, who published his first volume of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956). Cohen achieved international fame in the 1960s and early 1970s with his bitter-sweet ironic songs and subsequently put his career as an entertainer before his writing. The evocative imagery and concern with cont…
Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Kingston, Ontario, educated at the University of Toronto and McMaster University. The fragmented, dreamlike narratives of his early novels, Korsoniloff (1969) and Johnny Crackle Sings (1971), initiated his abiding concern with the nature of personal identity in their depictions of crisis and breakdown. A more conventional manner is apparent in The …
a novel by S. Gibbons, published in 1932, a humorous parody of contemporary dialect novels of rural life, such as the lurid Precious Bane (1924) by Mary Webb, as well as of Lawrence's philosophies and of Hardyesque pessimism. The cheerful heroine, ?Flora Poste?, visits her Starkadder cousins (Judith, Amos, Seth, Ezra, Urk, and Caraway) in a dismal Sussex farmhouse under the tyranny of Aunt Ada Doo…
British socialist and dissenting economist, born in Cambridge, educated at St Paul's School and at Balliol College, Oxford; he became Reader in Economics in that university after the First World War and Professor of Social and Political Theory after the Second. Cole's contribution to the socialist movement in the first half of the twentieth century is rivalled only by that of the Webbs (his advers…
British novelist, born in London; she left school at the age of 16. Her first novel, The Blackmailer (1958), dealt with the decline of the English aristocracy and the disintegration of class structures in the aftermath of the First World War, a theme to which she was to return in subsequent works, including A Man of Power (1960) and The Great Occasion (1962). Similarly, her trilogy of novels, Orla…
British philosopher, the son of John Ruskin's secretary; he was born in Lancashire, and educated at University College, Oxford, becoming a fellow of Pembroke College in 1912. After serving in the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty during the First World War, he lectured in philosophy at Oxford, where he became Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1935. His earlier writings, not…
British dramatist, born in Halifax, educated at Queen's College, Oxford; he has worked as a teacher and journalist. His first play, And Was Jerusalem Builded Here, which involved militant Luddites protesting against the mechanization of the weaving industry in the Yorkshire of 1812, was performed in 1972; subsequent work includes a children's play, Beauty and the Beast (1973); The Strongest Man in…
Grenadian poet and novelist, born in Aruba. She was a teacher and Research Officer in Latin American Affairs (1979?83). After the US invasion of Grenada she moved to Britain, where she became a member of a performance group, ?African Dawn?, and a notable performance poet, much committed to revolution, and to women's liberation, in Grenada and elsewhere. Many of the poems in Because the Dawn Breaks…
Irish biographer and writer on natural history, born in Dublin, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His early published works, which brought him little success, include the novel The Sounding Cataract (1936). During the Second World War he worked as a farm labourer in the south of England, subsequently establishing his reputation as a writer with While Following the Plough (1946) and Down to Eart…
Irish dramatist and poet, born in Longford, Ireland; he was educated at Glasthule National School, Dublin, and began his working life as a clerk. He achieved prominence through the success of his plays The Land (1905) and The Fiddler's House (1907) at the Abbey Theatre. Thomas Muskerry (1910) proved controversial for its sombrely realistic treatment of conditions in rural Ireland. In 1914 he emigr…
a play by Trevor Griffiths, performed in 1975 and published in 1976. It involves six working-class men, studying to become professional comedians with Eddie Waters, who believes that a good joke, far from exploiting prejudice or perpetuating racial or sexual stereotypes, truthfully illuminates the things that worry or frighten people. However, they are asked to audition for a London agent, Bert Ch…
The term refers to at least three different kinds of graphic and other work: drawings of jokes and serial adventures in certain newspapers (largely, initially American ones); certain (now mostly defunct) British magazines for children, offering stories, jokes, puzzles, and competitions; and (again largely American) colourful magazines depicting the exploits of superheroes and other creatures of fa…
a novel by George Orwell, published in 1939. Coming Up for Air is Orwell's most convincing novel of contemporary British life, although like several books written by members of Orwell's generation on the brink of the Second World War, it is also charged with memories of an Edwardian childhood. The poignancy of its flights of nostalgia, which circle round the rural landscapes of the Thames valley, …
and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932) were V. Woolf's two collections of essays published in her lifetime, which she selected, revised, added to, and ordered from her enormous output of reviewing (mostly, anonymously, for the Times Literary Supplement). The title phrase is taken from Dr Johnson. The essays are written from the point of view of a highly cultured, widely read, largely self-edu…
British novelist, born in Pinner, Middlesex, one of the twelve children of a leading homoeopathic physician, James Compton-Burnett, and his second wife. She spent her childhood in Hove and continued to live there until she was 27, except for a period as a student of Classics at Royal Holloway College. Her early life was overshadowed by tragedy: her brother Guy died of pneumonia; another favourite …
British novelist, born in Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, educated at art schools in Stratford-on-Avon and London. Her unusual childhood, peopled by numerous sisters and governesses, a deaf mother, and an authoritarian father, was the subject of her first novel, Sisters by a River (1947), and is also the framework of two subsequent novels, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) and The Skin Chairs…
the term describing poems in which the semantic values of the words composing them are complemented, and sometimes subsumed, by the graphic designs in which they are arranged on the page. Antecedents for writing of this kind include the ?pattern poems? of George Herbert, ?Easter Wings' being the best known, and aspects of Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918), notably ?Il pleut?, in which the words fo…
American writer of science fiction, born in New York City. He worked as a publicist in the film industry from 1936 to 1957. His extravagant fantasies on the American Dream varied in form from the spy thriller to political satire and science fiction. His vision was both comic and dark. In his best-known novel, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), a demagogic American senator, resembling Joseph McCarthy…
the best-known of Robin Jenkins's early novels, published in 1955. The narrative is set in Scotland during the Second World War and draws on Jenkins's experience of forestry work at this time, when he was a conscientious objector to military service. The ?cone-gatherers? of the title are the brothers Calum and Neil, who are collecting pinecones on the estate of Lady Runcie-Campbell to provide seed…
written principally by Americans during the 1960s, is characterized by great candour in the treatment of intimately autobiographical experiences and attitudes. The term was adopted by critics rather than by the poets to whose work it applied. The traditions of confessional literature extend back to St Augustine, and Donne, Hopkins, and others produced poetry notable for its revealingly personal co…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Kansas City, educated at Dartmouth College, University of Kansas, Stanford University, and Columbia University. Connell's early writings were in the short story form; his first collection, The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories (1957), with its ironic satires of the provinciality and cultural aridity of Midwestern life, and At the Crossroads (1965), …
British essayist, editor, and critic, born in Coventry, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After a period as secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith, he began his career as a literary journalist and editor. He remains best known for his editorship of Horizon. The Rock Pool (1936), his first substantial publication, is an entertainingly insubstantial novel about a young Englishman in an artists' colony…
British poet, born in Manchester; after leaving school at 14, he worked as a textile designer between 1944 and 1960. In 1971 he became Professor of English at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. His first collection of poetry, With Love Somehow (1962), was followed by numerous others, including Lodgers (1965), In the Happy Valley (1971), The Memoirs of Uncle Harry (1974), and New and Selected Poems …
British poet and historian, born in Great Malvern, Worcester, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. After active service in the Second World War, he held a series of diplomatic postings until 1956, when he began lecturing at the London School of Economics. Since 1959 he has lived mainly in America as a senior research fellow at various universities and institutions. He is recognized as one of the …
novelist and short-story writer, born at Berdycz?w, in the Russian-annexed Polish Ukraine, into a family of land-owning Polish szlachta gentry. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a poet and translator of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hugo, was a national political figure, active in the nationalist insurrectionary movements which had flowered since the 1795 partition and colonizing of Poland by Russia, P…
British poet and translator, born in Kharghpur, India, educated at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where he became Research Fellow and Tutor in English in 1957. His work as a poet and translator has involved him closely with the poetic literature of the Welsh language and of the Welsh metrical and assonantal traditions. His first collection of poetry, Formal Poems (1961), was follow…
American novelist and editor, born in Moberly, Missouri. Conroy lost his father and brother in a mining disaster and spent some years as a migratory worker. These circumstances inform his best-known novel, The Disinherited (1933), written with the encouragement of H. L. Mencken. The book fictionalizes Conroy's own boyhood in a company-owned town, his itinerant labouring life, and experience of str…
British poet, born in Salford, educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Wadham College, Oxford. He lectured at Durham University until 1981, when he became a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. He became literary editor of Argo magazine. A Brightness to Cast Shadows (1981), his first collection of poetry, was followed by Watching for Dolphins (1983) and Madder (1987); Selected Poems appeared in…
a periodical founded in 1866 as the organ of the Metaphysical Society. Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Ruskin, and Thomas Huxley were among the contributors who established its high reputation for the quality of its articles on literary, socio-cultural, and scientific topics. Sir Percy Bunting was its editor from 1882 to 1910. Around the turn of the century work by Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yea…
British actor, novelist, and television playwright, born in Preston, Lancashire, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first novel, Albert's Memorial (1972), introduces us to the widowed Mary and the homosexual Paul, both bereaved and marginal tragi-comic figures, the first of his gallery of portraits of eccentric and often vagrant characters, all of whom are seen with insight, wit, a…
British regional novelist, born in Tyne Dock, Jarrow. She is a popular and prolific writer, most of whose works are set in her native Tyneside. She was the illegitimate daughter of Kate McMullen, a domestic servant whom she believed was her sister, and whose story she tells in her interesting autobiography Our Kate (1969); Cookson herself went into service after leaving school at the age of 14. Ca…
American poet, born in Providence, Rhode Island. Though associated with the Language Poets, his work predates the movement and despite close contact with many of them he remains distinct from any movement, literary or political. His primary literary influences are Rilke, Beckett, and Kerouac, but jazz, geology, and painting (he wrote a collaborative work with the painter Philip Guston: Baffling Me…
British playwright, born in Carrickmines, County Dublin, educated at Lancing College. He was an actor and television script-editor until 1955, when he became a full-time playwright for stage, television, and radio. His works for the stage include Everything in the Garden (1962) and The Spies Are Singing (1966). The Other Man (1964), his best-known work for television, offered a disquieting alterna…
British novelist, born in Eccles, Lancashire, educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first novel, The Lighted Room (1925), was one of ten written while she was in Yorkshire. The last of these, National Provincial (1938), led to an invitation to work in London, on the staff of Time and Tide, as editorial assistant and drama critic. During the Second World War, she was public relations officer …
English novelist, born in Crewe, Cheshire, educated at Christ's College, Cambridge. He was a physics teacher, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and worked for the Civil Service Commission and the Atomic Energy Authority. As H. S. Hoff he had written four novels before he became recognized with his fifth, Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), by ?William Cooper?, which consid…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Charles City, Iowa, educated at the universities of Southern Illinois, Indiana, and Chicago. Coover's novels turn away from traditional ?realist? forms, demonstrating a post-modern sense of ?reality? and history as ?made up?, fabricated, of fictions (see New Journalism). His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), was a study of the influen…
British poet, born in Erith, Kent, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She became a schoolteacher in London. Her early publications include Across the City (1980) and Hope and the 42 ? (1984). Her Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986) enjoyed considerable success; the book is most notable for its many parodies of the works of well-known poets, including T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Craig Raine, an…
British short-story writer and poet, born in Folkestone; ill-health curtailed his education at Lewes Road School, Brighton, when he was nine. After working in a variety of commercial capacities, he became a fulltime writer in 1919, publishing his first book of stories, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, in 1921. His many collections include Fishmonger's Fiddle (1925), Silver Circus (1928), Crotty Shinkwin…
Irish critic, dramatist, and short-story writer, born in Cork, educated at St Patrick's College, Dublin. In 1908 he founded, together with other nationalists, the Cork Dramatic Society, which produced plays in both Irish and English. Corkery's published plays include The Labour Leader (1920), The Yellow Bittern and Other Plays (1920), and Resurrection (1924). His collections of short stories, gene…
American editor and poet, born in Boston, Massachusetts, educated at Tufts College, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, and, as a Fulbright Fellow, the Sorbonne. From 1949 to 1951 he presented a series of broadcasts entitled ?This is Poetry? for a Boston radio station, which featured readings by leading younger American poets and initiated contact with a number of the con…
British poet, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin; she was born in Cambridge, where her parents were both lecturers. In 1909 she married F. M. Cornford, one of Cambridge's leading classicists and later the University's Professor of Ancient Philosophy. John Cornford was their son. She was encouraged in her early writing by Rupert Brooke during his time studying at Cambridge and published Poems, her…
British poet, born in Cambridgeshire, the son of Frances Cornford and the eminent Cambridge classicist Professor F. M. Cornford; he was educated at the London School of Economics and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a first in History. An active member of the Communist Party, he contributed the essay ?What Communism Stands For? to Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935, edited by…