Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a collection of ten stories by Dylan Thomas, published in 1940. Predominantly in an idiom of straightforward comic realism, much of the material derives from Thomas's autobiographical experience; ?The Peaches?, among the funniest and most moving of the stories, evokes a visit in childhood to the farm in Carmarthenshire which Thomas later made the setting for the poem ?Fern Hill?. ?The Fight?, ?Whe…
a novel in five chapters by James Joyce. The novel began its life in 1904 as Stephen Hero, which Joyce abandoned and partly destroyed in 1907 and subsequently rewrote in full by 1914. With the help of Yeats, Pound, and Harriet Shaw Weaver, it was serialized in The Egoist and, after difficulties similar to those experienced with Dubliners, published in the USA in 1916. Apparently autobiographical, …
is a term that was used by the American critic R. P. Blackmur and others as early as the 1950s, but became fashionable, indeed ubiquitous, in the late 1980s. It was employed to describe not only architecture, literature, and music but haircuts, habits, jokes, states of mind. Its general connotations are irony, self-mockery, allusiveness, parody, immersion in popular culture, refusal to believe in …
is often taken to be synonymous with Deconstruction, and it is true that Deconstruction has seemed to be the main form that Post-structuralism has taken. Without Structuralism, Deconstruction would not have been possible; and it does offer both a continuation and a reversal of Structuralism's assumptions and practices, seeking gaps, lapses, and inconsistencies where Structuralism sought rules and …
English humorist and radio producer, born at Clapham in South London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. His early works include D. H. Lawrence: A First Study (1930), Coleridge and S. T. C. (1935), and The Muse in Chains (1937), an irreverent attack on the teaching of English literature in universities. In 1938 he became writer and producer in the Features Department of the BBC; among other progr…
American poet, born in Hailey, Idaho; he grew up in Philadelphia where his father worked as an assayer with the US mint. His study of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania had an important bearing on the development of his poetry, which was initially influenced by the works of Swinburne and Rosetti. As a student he began his long friendship with William Carlos Williams and was briefl…
English novelist, born in London, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. At his prep school in Kent he met Henry Yorke (later the novelist, Henry Green) and both subsequently attended Eton and Oxford. Their chance meeting, Powell acknowledged, foreshadowed a constant theme in his fiction, the part that coincidence and chance play in life. At Eton his contemporaries included George Orwell, Harold Act…
a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1940, a time when conflicts between religious and secular or political imperatives frequently shape his writing. In this novel, these are played out between individual characters, named only as the Priest and the Lieutenant?Greene later used similar tactics, though much more lightly, in Monsignor Quixote (1982). As in the later novel, he tries to ensure that …
British novelist, poet, and polemicist, born in Derbyshire, educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The son of a clergyman and brother of Llewelyn and Theodore Powys, he spent his boyhood in the West Country, which was later to feature in many of his novels. Between 1904 and 1934, he lived in the USA before settling in North Wales. He published Odes (1896) and Poems (1899), but only with hi…
British essayist, born in Dorchester, the brother of J. C. Powys and T. F. Powys, educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In 1909 he learned he was suffering from tuberculosis and entered a sanitorium in Davos-Platz, Switzerland; his illness is memorably dealt with in Skin for Skin (1925). He subsequently travelled in Europe and began a period as a farmer in Kenya in 1914. From 1920 to 1928…
British novelist, born at Shirley in Derbyshire, the brother of John Cowper and Llewelyn Powys, educated at Sherborne School. Much of his fiction draws on the social and natural characters of his surroundings at East Chaldon, Dorset, where he lived from 1904 to 1940. A deeply religious sensibility pervades his writing; his idiosyncratic metaphysical views are outlined in An Interpretation of Genes…
Canadian poet, born in Newfoundland, educated at the University of Toronto. The son of a Methodist minister, Pratt was also ordained himself, but subsequently pursued an academic career. Although often considered Canada's finest writer of narrative verse of the twentieth century, much of his work is concerned with Victorian conflicts, such as the collapse of faith and humanity's relationship with …
a Canadian journal largely devoted to poetry and short stories, founded in Montreal in 1942 by an editorial group which included Patrick Anderson, F. R. Scott, P. K. Page, and Bruce Ruddick. It was intended as a platform for innovative and socially concerned literature and stood in opposition to the more traditional and conservative modes which Canadian Poetry Magazine was felt to espouse. The cri…
American author, born in North Carolina, educated at Duke University. His first novel, A Long and Happy Life (1962), set like almost all his fiction in his native state, centres on a young girl of small-farming background who discovers she is pregnant by her errant boyfriend. The girl's family reappears in the long story ?A Chain of Love? in The Names and Faces of Heroes (1963) and in A Generous M…
British novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist, born in Bradford, educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, after serving throughout the First World War. The short essays of Brief Diversions (1922) impressed J. C. Squire, who assisted Priestley to establish himself as a journalist in London. Among his other early publications are the critical study Figures in Modern Literature (1924) and the essays…
a novel by Muriel Spark, published in 1961. The rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s is one of the book's underlying themes, although its ostensible subject, the relationship between an eccentric and highly strung Edinburgh schoolmistress, Jean Brodie, and her acolytes, a group of adolescent schoolgirls, seems at first sight far removed from such a theme. As the novel progresses the parallel…
British poet and scholar, born in Kimberley, South Africa, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Princeton. He began his academic career in 1946 at the University of Southampton, where he was Professor of English from 1957 to 1974. Poems (1938), his first collection of verse, was followed by Soldiers Bathing (1954), the title piece of which is one of the most widely anthologized poems of the…
, British novelist, critic, and short-story writer. Born in Ipswich, son of a travelling salesman with religious ambitions, Pritchett was educated at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, which he left at 15 to work in the leather trade. His early immersion in the heterogeneous life of the city has proved perhaps his greatest asset as a writer, his powers of observation being greatly developed also by persis…
a novel by Willa Cather, published in 1925. The novel is intricately constructed and symbolic at many different levels. Its central figure, Professor St Peter, is a man in late middle age, who is about to leave the house where he has lived all his married life and where he has done his finest work (he is an authority on the Spanish in America). As the novel opens, he is very aware that he has arri…
the theory and practice of poetry described in Charles Olson's essay ?Projective Verse?, which appeared in Poetry New York in 1950; it was collected in Olson's Selected Writings (edited by Robert Creeley, 1966). Olson's conceptions, which extended the developments chiefly associated with the work of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (see also Imagism, Objectivist Poetry, and free Verse), cent…
The beginnings of the proletarian ?tradition?, sometimes termed ?movement?, in twentieth-century American letters can be dated to the first appearance of The Masses magazine in 1911. Founded by Piet Vlag but most influential from 1913 onwards under the editorships of Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, The Masses espoused an exhilarating mixture of avant-gardism, anarchism, and radical socialism. By 1918 …
T. S. Eliot's first collection of poems, published in 1917 under the imprint of the Egoist magazine. Ezra Pound undertook arrangements for publication and assisted with the costs of printing. Its forty pages contained work Eliot had produced between 1911 and 1915 while variously resident in Paris, Boston, and Oxford. The following poems appeared in the order given: ?The Love Song of J. Alfred Pruf…
British poet, born in Kent, educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1962 he became a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he also became a lecturer and College Librarian. Prynne's numerous collections of poetry include Kitchen Poems (1968), The White Stones (1969), Brass (1971), High Pink on Chrome (1975), The Oval Window (1983), and Word Order (1989); Poems (1982) presents work…
Psychoanalysis is both a theory of the mind and a practice of interpretation. Its early applications to literature, by Freud himself and by disciples like Marie Bonaparte and Ernest Jones, concentrated on the presumed psychology of the writer, on the repressed or displaced psychic material uncovered by textual analysis and recombination. This work was often reductive, too eager to crack the case, …
British poet, born in Langley, Buckinghamshire, educated at Gresham's School, Holt, Norfolk. After working as a producer with the BBC, he began a career in publishing in 1950. Spring Encounter, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1933. During the Second World War he gained a wide readership with a succession of volumes reflecting his experiences of active service with the Raf. The six colle…
The annual Pulitzer Prizes were inaugurated in 1917 as the result of the bequest of newspaper proprietor Joseph Pulitzer (1847?1911) to provide funds for the foundation of Columbia University School of Journalism. The will established four categories of American literature: novel, play, US biography and US history. Prizes were extended to poetry in 1922, and to journalism in 1962. In 1947 novels w…
Canadian writer, born in Cranbrook in the Rocky Mountains; she briefly attended McGill University before moving to England in 1982. Her first published book, Tiny Lies (1988), was an acclaimed collection of stories which blended comedy and satire with insight into the lives and dreams of single young women. Her first novel, When The Monster Dies (1989), was set in a rundown, contemporary South Lon…
Canadian poet, born in Wooler in rural Ontario. He led a nomadic early life, working at a variety of jobs and travelling extensively, but though the eclecticism of his poetry reflects the diversity of his experience of life, its central locus is ?the country north of Belleville?, Ontario, which provided a title for one of his best-known poems. The main preoccupation of his work is the effect that …
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Ohio, educated at the University of Ohio and the University of Puebla, Mexico. His work is often set in West Virginia or in New York where he has spent most of his life. Purdy established his dominant theme of a lost boy, casually encountered by the narrator in his first extended fiction, 63 Dream Palace (1956). Malcolm (1959, dramatized 1965 by Ed…
a play by Bernard Shaw, performed in 1913 in Vienna, published and performed in London in 1916. This amusing piece, which was eventually to achieve popular renown as the musical My Fair Lady (1957), describes the reconstruction of the Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle by the arrogant phonetician Henry Higgins. Her education falls into three stages. At first she says the wrong things in the right…
a term loosely applied to numerous poets of the 1930s whose work contained imagery reflecting the impact of industry and technology upon Britain's landscape and culture. It was used from about 1935 onward, often disparagingly; Julian Symons, for example, expressed relief in the first issue of Twentieth Century Verse (1937) that Dylan Thomas was not ?a Pylon-Pitworks-Pansy poet?. Pylons feature in …
British novelist, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Pym's first published novel was Some Tame Gazelle (1950), followed by Excellent Women (1952); Jane Prudence (1953); Less Than Angels (1955); A Glass of Blessings (1958); and No Fond Return of Love (1961). These are wry comedies of middle-class life, often with tragic undertones, extraordinarily observant and with a breadth of emotional and …
American novelist and short-story writer, born on Long Island, New York, educated at Cornell University. Pynchon is regarded by many as the archetypal post-modern novelist, whose work has been the expression of an America suspended between chaos and systematic paranoia. Since he has been one of the most determinedly private of writers, biographical information rests on rumours and apocrypha. He sp…
a journal of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (part of the International Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist organ of the 1950s). It was established in 1956 under the editorship of James McAuley, who saw it as a vehicle for his essentially European and traditionalist vision. Modelled on Britain's Encounter, it was intended as a political, social, and literary magazine t…
British biographer, critic, and essayist, born at Bickley, Kent, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. From 1925 to 1930 he wrote for the Criterion and other leading periodicals. After holding a professorship in Tokyo, which gave rise to A Superficial Journey through Tokyo and Peking (1932), he returned to literary journalism. He edited the Cornhill Magazine between 1944 and 1951, when he began His…
a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set during France's military struggle to retain Vietnam, which Greene witnessed during trips to the country as a journalist in the early 1950s. His nearly lifelong antipathy to the USA and readier sympathy for communist regimes figure in the novel's prescient warning about early American infiltration of Vietnam. This focuses on Alden Pyle, a young di…
British novelist, critic, and editor, born in Bodmin, Cornwall, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, where he adopted the pseudonym ?Q? under which much of his later writing appeared. Dead Man's Rock (1887) was the first of his many adventure novels; others include The Ship of Stars (1899) and Poison Island (1907). His fiction was collected in the thirty volumes of Tales and Romances (1928?9). He …
American philosopher, born in Akron, Ohio, educated at Harvard, where he held a succession of appointments throughout his academic career. His doctoral studies were supervised by A. N. Whitehead. In 1932 he visited Vienna, Warsaw, and Prague, where he began a lasting association with Rudolf Carnap; their letters are collected in Dear Carnap, Dear Van (edited by R. Creath, 1990). His early publicat…
British travel writer, born at Fakenham in Norfolk, educated at Hull University. He lectured at University College, Aberystwyth, and the University of East Anglia from 1965 to 1969, when he became a full-time writer. His early publications include the critical essays of The Technique of Modern Fiction (1968) and The Society of the Poem (1971), his stimulating study of post-war poetry. Soft City (1…
a sequence of novels by John Updike, comprising Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981; Pulitzer Prize), and Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer Prize), which chronicles the life of Harry ?Rabbit? Angstrom from his adolescence to middle age. In Rabbit Run, Harry rebels against the constraints of his society and impulsively flees from his domestic responsibilities (from his wife Ja…