Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a play by Eugene O'Neill, produced in 1946. The play marked O'Neill's return to the theatre after a twelve-year absence, and though widely heralded as a masterpiece, many critics felt it to be too long. A brilliant revival in 1956 did much to establish its reputation as one of O'Neill's greatest plays. In a seedy tavern run by the ironically named Harry Hope, a group of down-and-outs nurse their i…
a novel by Robert Graves, published in 1934. The book charts the unlikely fortunes of Claudius, who succeeds in surviving the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula before reluctantly becoming emperor in its closing stages. The narrative purports to be the emperor's lost autobiography, and is continued in Claudius the God, which appeared in the same year. Graves read very widely in preparation for the bo…
New Zealand Maori novelist and short-story writer, born at Gisborne, educated at Auckland University, and at Victoria University, Wellington. Ihimaera worked for many years for the Ministry of External Affairs and has held posts in many countries. His story collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972) was the first collection of stories by a Maori writer to be published, and has proved popular in furnishing…
Nigerian novelist, born in Eastern Nigeria, educated at Government College, Ibadan, and Stanford University, California. He has produced the authoritative University Development in Africa: The Nigerian Experience (1976), and has held several important administrative academic posts in Nigeria. Most of his novels are satirical and deftly comic expos?s of university life in West Africa, and could be …
the first volume of a multi-volume autobiography by Maya Angelou, published in 1970. The book broke ground for African-American women writers in terms of critical acclaim and large sales. It is a powerful and often painful evocation of Angelou's childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly in the black community of the US Deep South. As the book opens, the author?then Marguerite Johnson, lonely, shy, …
the first of numerous concerted movements associated with Anglo-American poetic Modernism. T. E. Hulme was influential in the emergence of Imagism's aesthetic and technical characters, which were summed up in the tripartite declaration of aims formulated by Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint and published in Poetry (Chicago) in 1913: ?1) Direct treatment of the ?thing?, whether subjective or objective; 2)…
a monthly journal established in 1972 by Writers and Scholars International, a group dedicated to recording and analysing the extent and effects of state censorship throughout the world; Stephen Spender and the Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov were directly instrumental in the formation of the organization in 1971. Having begun under Michael Scammell's editorship as Index, in 1975 it became known b…
American dramatist, born in Independence, Kansas, educated at the University of Kansas and the George Peabody College for Teachers. Inge worked as a general arts critic for the St Louis Star-Times when he met Tennessee Williams, with whose encouragement he wrote his first play, Farther off from Heaven (1947). His second play, Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), was a popular success on Broadway; equal…
a play by J. B. Priestley, first performed in Moscow in 1945. Although the play is set in 1912, it clearly reflects the anti-establishment views of an author committed to the election of a socialist party. A man claiming to be a local policeman, Inspector Goole, arrives at the house of Arthur Birling, wealthy Conservative industrialist and ex-Lord Mayor of Brumley, who has been playing the host at…
a novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. The novel charts the ?progress? of its narrator, a young Southern black, from his early days in a black college (modelled on Ellison's own college, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama; the portrait in the novel of President Bledsoe, the college president, is loosely based on Tuskegee's founder, Booker T. Washington), through his travels north to New York City…
the first (its origins go back as far as 1922) and most prominent of the large number of American university graduate programmes in creative writing, in Iowa City. These degrees, especially the Masters programmes, have had an enormous, yet hard to define, influence on contemporary American writing, especially poetry and fiction. According to one estimate more than a quarter of the best-known write…
Australian novelist, born in Sydney. After a wide range of employment and experiences, he became a full-time writer in 1973. His informing concern with humankind's aspirations and self-deceptions warrants comparison with Peter Carey. A working method of scenes/passages written on filing cards enables Ireland to ?shuffle? his novel in construction to achieve the careful disconnectedness central to …
a major movement of cultural nationalism in Ireland which began in the 1880s and retained much of its energy until the late 1920s. Standish O'Grady (1846?1928) is regarded as its principal progenitor, his two-volume History of Ireland (1878, 1880) having made much of Ireland's ancient mythical and legendary material widely available. Other precursors of the Revival include the poets of the Young I…
a novel by Jack London, published in 1907. A bleak pessimism pervades this dystopic narrative, rejected even by contemporary socialists because of its horrific representation of the future. It is written in the form of a diary kept by the wife of a proletarian leader, Ernest Everhard, annotated as a manuscript discovered several centuries later. Part love story, part social satire, the novel begin…
American novelist, born in Exeter, New Hampshire, educated at the universities of Pittsburgh, Vienna, New Hampshire, and Iowa. Irving's first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1969), was followed by The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), but it was his fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), which established both his considerable critical reputation and his commerci…
British novelist, born in Cheshire, educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Isherwood knew W. H. Auden at his preparatory school, and Edward Upward (Allen Chalmers) at Repton and Cambridge; later he enjoyed a close friendship with Auden's Oxford friend, Stephen Spender, and played a strong creative part in the development of their poetry. His first novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and Th…
British novelist, born in Nagasaki, Japan, of ?middle-class samurai parents?; he moved with his family to England at the age of six where he was educated at the universities of Kent and East Anglia. Ishiguro has written short stories and television plays but it was his first three dazzling short novels that brought him recognition. Though he did not return to Japan until a brief visit in 1989, the…
South African novelist and short-story writer, born in Johannesburg. In 1980 he became Reader in English at University College, London. Jacobson's naturalistic earlier novels, The Trap (1955), A Dance in the Sun (1956), The Price of Diamonds (1958), The Evidence of Love (1960), and The Beginners (1966), illuminate different aspects of the human condition in South Africa. The Wonder-Worker (1973) a…
British novelist, born in Manchester, educated at Cambridge University; he has taught English at Selwyn College, Cambridge, Sydney University, and Wolverhampton Polytechnic. His first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), was set at the fictional West Midlands institution of Wrottesley Polytechnic and concerned the exploits of Sefton Goldberg, a young Jewish academic obsessed with the notion that he i…
an early novel by V. Woolf, published in 1922, and written as an elegy for her brother Thoby, who died young in 1906. The novel tries to extend the fluid narrative method of her early short stories, using interconnected images (butterflies, a sheep's skull) carefully patterned. It is strongly influenced by her reading of Greek literature. The factual ?biography? of Jacob moves from his childhood o…
Australian writer and broadcaster, born in Kogarah, New South Wales, Australia, educated at Sydney University and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Collections of his early work as a literary journalist with the Times Literary Supplement and other leading periodicals include The Metropolitan Critic (1974). Visions Before Midnight (1977) collects samples of his work as television critic for the Observer…
Trinidadian historian, political theorist, and novelist, born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, educated at Queen's Royal College. In the early 1930s he was involved in the publication of two influential literary and political magazines, Trinidad and The Beacon. In 1932 he moved to Britain where he became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and later the Glasgow Herald. In …
American novelist and author of short stories, critical essays, and plays, born in New York, son of the Swedenborgian philosopher Henry James, Sr, brother of William James. He spent many of his formative years in Europe, residing in Geneva, London, Paris, and Boulogne in 1855?8 and 1859?60, until returning to live in Newport, Rhode Island in 1860. He entered Harvard Law School in 1862. With encour…
British writer and scholar, born at Goodnestone, Kent, educated at King's College, Cambridge. In the course of a long academic career, he was Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge (1913?15) and Provost of Eton College (1918?36). He possessed an unrivalled knowledge of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts and was a leading authority on Biblical Apocrypha. He is best remembered for Ghost Stories of an Antiquary…
British crime writer, born in Oxford, educated at Cambridge High School. Before turning to authorship, James held various appointments in hospital administration and was later a senior civil servant in the police and criminal policy departments of the Home Office, and a Justice of the Peace. She has used her experience to good effect in a series of detective novels beginning with Cover Her Face (1…
American psychologist and philosopher, the brother of Henry James the novelist, born in New York. He gained his MD in 1870 at Harvard University, where he taught from 1872 to 1907 and established a laboratory of psychology in 1876, carrying out the extensive programme of research that resulted in The Principles of Psychology (2 volumes, 1890); its opening statement that ?Psychology is the Science …
American scholar and critic, born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Haverford College and Yale. Perhaps the most distinguished English-language Marxist literary theorist of the post-Second World War period, Jameson has taught at Yale, the University of California, and Duke University. His initial engagement was with Sartre and with French philosophy and literature, but he also confronted the work of…