Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a science fiction term, used to define a loose movement of 1980s writers whose works anticipated the effects of the high-tech computerized world to come. The term was taken by editor Gardner Dozois from the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke and applied by him primarily to novels by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling to designate work which embraced the new cybernetic world-environment, while s…
Guyanese poet, novelist, and art historian, born in Guyana, educated at Cambridge and London Universities. He has held a number of academic appointments in America. His first book, Slave Song (1984; Commonwealth Prize for Poetry), contains harshly ?anti-pastoral? monologues in Creole dialect recreating the brutally restricted and anguished lives of sugar plantation workers. The poetry in Coolie Od…
an anarchic internationalist movement in art and literature which originated in Zurich in 1916, where the Cabaret Voltaire, a caf? opened by Hugo Ball, a German theatrical producer, provided a focus for exhibitions, readings, and other more experimental forms of creative activity. Dada, a French word for ?hobby-horse? chosen on impulse from a dictionary by Ball, formed a conscious reaction by vari…
British poet and novelist, born in London of Guyanese parents. He spent his early years in Guyana, and returned to London in 1972 where he trained as a psychiatric nurse; he also read English and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent. D'Aguiar's poems are notable for their humane yet unsentimental humour, and mastery of the Creole dialect. Mama Dot (1985) and Airy Hall (1989) contain poems r…
American novelist and essayist, born in Boston, Massachusetts; he left a Jewish orphanage to drift around the USA and Europe. He graduated from Columbia University in 1925. Bottom Dogs (1929), a novel dealing with his orphan years in Kansas City and Cleveland, was written as an expatriate and first appeared in London, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence. Dahlberg was on the literary left in the…
British critic, born in Sunderland; he grew up in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the University. After gaining his D.Phil. at Oxford in 1939, he held professorships at the University of Chicago and Cornell University. Having returned to Britain in 1951, he lectured at Cambridge before becoming Professor of English at the University of Sussex in 1961. A critic of unusual range, his works, whic…
British poet, born in Addlestone, Surrey, educated at St Peter's College, Oxford. A schoolteacher by profession, he was appointed Head of English at Hinchley Wood School, Surrey, in 1972. In 1971 he became co-editor of Agenda magazine. His reputation was firmly established with The Storms (1968), his first substantial collection of verse, which earned him an Arts Council bursary in 1969. Mortal Fi…
Australian writer, born in Sydney, the daughter of Lou d'Alpuget, a well-known Sydney journalist; she herself worked as a journalist, and lived in Malaysia and Indonesia for a number of years. Her first novel, Monkeys in the Dark (1980), about a young Australian journalist's involvement with an Indonesian activist in the aftermath of the 1965 coup in Jakarta, has affiliations with Christopher Koch…
Beginning with A Question of Upbringing (1951), ending with Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), and borrowing its title and pervasive metaphor from Nicolas Poussin's painting in the Wallace Collection, London, the sequence is widely regarded as one of the main achievements in twentieth-century English fiction and Powell's finest work. Written in a typically rococo style, and calling frequently on cha…
Australian novelist, born in Sydney. She began contributing stories to the Bulletin and other journals from 1921. Her first novel, Slow Dawning (1932), like many of her works, was set in a small country town. Prelude to Christopher (1933), a more ambitious novel, displays a prevailing concern with the nature of time. Return to Coolami (1935) explores the inner worlds of four people during a long c…
a novel by Arthur Koestler, published in 1940, translated from German, which George Orwell regarded as a valuable ?interpretation of the Moscow ?confessions? by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods?. The novel concerns Stalin's regime and his purge of the Soviet Communist Party during the late 1930s. Koestler, however, wrote it as a parable set in an anonymous state ruled by ?No…
British poet, the daughter of Robert Bridges; she was born in London and educated privately. After her marriage in 1923 she travelled with her husband to Persia, his native country, and returned to England in 1927. Her first collection of poetry, Charitessi (1911), was followed by two other early volumes, Verses (1916) and Sonnets from Hafez (1921). She subsequently disclaimed these, however, cons…
Indian writer, born in Malabar, India. Her autobiographical My Story (India, 1976; UK, 1978) is a highly introspective and subjective account of the creation and development of a woman poet. It is interspersed with some of Das's best verse. Famous, even notorious, for her poetic articulation of female sexuality and illicit passions, Das is actually a skilled chronicler of everyday experience, both…
American short-story writer, critic, poet, and translator, born in Anderson, South Carolina, educated at Duke University, Merton College, Oxford, and Harvard. He became Professor of English at the University of Kentucky in 1963. Among his earlier publications is Motive and Method in the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1954), the first of a series of works on that author. The scope of his criticism is demons…
American philosopher, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard University. He has held professorships at Princeton, Rockefeller University, New York, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at various universities throughout the world. Since the late 1960s he has exerted wide influence in analytical philosophy, par…
British poet and critic, born in Barnsley, educated at St Catherine's College, Cambridge, where he absorbed the influence of F. R. Leavis, upon whom he reflected in his volume of memoirs These the Companions (1982). After holding a succession of academic posts in Britain and Ireland, he was appointed to a professorship at Stanford University, California, in 1968 and became Professor of Humanities …
British poet, born in Rhymney, Monmouthshire. At the age of 14 he became a coal miner. When the mine in which he worked was closed after the General Strike of 1926, he studied at Loughborough College and the University of Nottingham, and subsequently worked as a teacher in London and Rhymney. Gwalia Deserta (1938), his first volume of poetry, contained thirty-six poems thematically unified by thei…
Canadian novelist and dramatist, born in Thamesville, Ontario, educated at Queen's University and at Balliol College, Oxford. Davies worked as an actor in England before returning to Canada, where he became a distinguished academic and editor of The Peterborough Examiner to which he contributed a weekly column under the pseudonym ?Samuel Marchbanks?. This writing is collected in The Diary of Samue…
British poet, born in Newport, Monmouthshire. He was apprenticed to a picture-framer after elementary education, but became a vagrant and subsequently took part in the Klondike gold-rush, losing a leg while attempting to steal a ride on a train. He settled in London, living with great frugality on a small allowance from his grandmother. In 1905 he produced, at his own expense, a volume of poems en…
New Zealand novelist and short-story writer, born in Invercargill, New Zealand, educated at Otago University and at Balliol College, Oxford. After war service he joined the Oxford University Press and produced the Introduction to English Literature (1947) with John Mulgan. His novel Cliffs of Fall (1945) evoked memories of youth in New Zealand with a sense of isolation and conflict that is often p…
British poet, born in Portsmouth, educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the University of Manchester. He held a succession of teaching posts in Greece, Italy, Iran, and elsewhere from 1967 to 1988, when he became Assistant Professor of Persian at Ohio State University. His poetry was first collected with work by Clive Wilmer and Robert Wells in Shade Mariners (1970). In the Distance (1975) wa…
Australian poet and dramatist; the son of part-Aboriginal parents, he belongs to the Aboriginal Bibbulmun tribe of Western Australia. He worked for many years on cattle stations in the north of the state, a bitter experience which led him to return to Perth as a champion of the Aboriginal cause. He later became manager of the Perth Aboriginal Centre in 1967, director of the Aboriginal Advancement …
Australian poet, born in Geelong, Victoria; he left school at 16 and worked at many jobs prior to attending the universities of Melbourne and Queensland. Dawe's talent in articulating large issues through everyday concerns is clear from his first poetry volumes No Fixed Address (1962) and A Need of Similar Name (1965). A Roman Catholic poet, his concerns are non-sectarian; Dawe has written of his …
American novelist, short-story writer, and painter, born in New York City; he grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri and was educated at Black Mountain College from 1949 to 1953. The Black Mountain Book (1970; revised and expanded, 1991) remains the most valuable memoir of the college during its Olson era and the experience clearly set the agenda for Dawson's future development as a writer. A master of the…
American essayist and humorist, born in New York City, educated at Yale University. Day served in the US navy during the Spanish-American War (1898). He settled in New York and sought to establish himself as a writer and illustrator. This Simian World (1920), his satirical reflections on man's origins coupled with his fantastic speculations about man's alternative origins, and illustrated with his…
British poet and, as ?Nicholas Blake?, writer of detective fiction, born in Ballintogher, near Sligo, educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. The son of a clergyman, Day Lewis lived in England from 1905; in 1908 his mother died and he was looked after by the aunt to whom he paid moving tribute in the late poem ?My Mother's Sister?. At Oxford his literary associates included Stephe…
a novel by Willa Cather, published in 1927. The novel is Cather's fictional tribute to the beauties and strengths of European Catholicism. (She never actually became a Catholic, as was popularly believed, but found in the Church an acceptable imaginative alternative to what she saw as the greedy, crass society of post-First World War America.) The novel takes two distinguished French servants of t…
It tells the story of the shattering of a secure and happy family when the father is killed in a car crash. Agee's writings are marked by an exploration of his own past; this novel focuses on a young boy named Rufus, Agee's middle name. The book opens with ?Knoxville: Summer of 1915?, a passage of descriptive prose by a mature man trying to reconstruct a child's perspective of a summer evening wit…
The freshness and authenticity with which many of the poems made use of themes and imagery drawn from Heaney's rural upbringing were among the principal reasons for the book's enthusiastic critical reception. Poems like the title piece, ?The Barn?, and ?Churning Day? display a Wordsworthian intensity of recollection in their sensuously detailed recreations of incidents in childhood. Elsewhere, the…
Described by Miller himself as ?Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem?, it makes use of Expressionist devices to present the life of Willy Loman and his relationship with his family up to the point at which he commits suicide. The action of the play proceeds both forwards and backwards and is remarkable both for its realistic portrayal of an American family and for its dramatic p…
Portia Quayne has had a vagrant, intimate childhood with her mother, who has died. The 16-year-old orphan has come to live with her half-brother Thomas and his cynical, egotistical, attractive wife Anna. Thomas's father made one late attempt to break free from the domineering Mrs Quayne (a powerful offstage figure) and fathered Portia, an intense, nervous, observant waif, whose arrival disrupts th…
Australian novelist, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he was educated at Queen's Royal College. In the 1920s de Boissi?re, who is of French Creole ancestry, was associated with a circle of politically radical young Trinidadian writers, such as Alfred H. Mendes and C. L. R. James, who contributed to the short-lived but highly influential monthly, The Beacon. He emigrated to Australia in 1947,…
Waugh's first novel, which was an immediate success, describes the misfortunes of Paul Pennyfeather, an innocent abroad in the decadent world of fashionable 1920s society. Sent down from Scone College, Oxford, after being wrongly accused of indecent behaviour, he is forced to give up his theological studies in order to become a schoolmaster (an episode which owes something to Waugh's own disastrou…
was not so much a movement as a practice of reading, a learned habit of scepticism. It was chiefly associated with the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (notably Writing and Difference, 1967; Of Grammatology, 1967; Margins, 1972; Dissemination, 1972), which in turn was a critical revision of many of the propositions of Structuralism. The architectural metaphors are not accidental. Str…
British thriller writer, called by Julian Symons ?a kind of poet of the spy novel?; born in London, educated at the Royal College of Art. He served in the RAF and worked in a variety of professions before turning to authorship. His first book, The Ipcress File (1962), with its unnamed, working-class hero, elliptic narration, and emphasis on departmental rivalry in British intelligence, gave a new …
a play by J. M. Synge; it was left unrevised at the dramatist's death and published posthumously, in 1910. The eponymous heroine, a foundling brought up to be his wife by Conchubor, High King of Ulster, rejects this unwanted marriage. Instead, she chooses Naisi for her husband, notwith-standing a prophecy that she will ruin him, and escapes with him and his brothers from Emain Macha to safety abro…
British novelist, born in Monmouthshire, the daughter of Count Henry de la Pasture and Mrs Henry de la Pasture, a popular novelist. She adopted the pseudonym ?E. M. Delafield?, a loose translation of her French ancestral name, to avoid confusion between her own writing and her mother's. Her first novel, Zella Sees Herself (1917), was followed by over thirty others, including The War Workers (1918)…
British poet, born at Charlton in South East London, educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School; he subsequently worked as a clerk with the Anglo-American Oil Company in London. Songs of Childhood, his first volume of poetry, was published under the pseudonym ?Walter Ramal? in 1902. Henry Brocken (1904) was the first of his novels, its narrative of encounters with famous literary characters esta…