Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
The classic adventure story is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Stevenson's thrilling first paragraph, an exquisitely crafted single sentence, which could profitably adorn the seminar rooms of any number of American campus writing schools, is a model of how to hook the reader's attention with the promise of drama to come. Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of …
For over four hundred years Africa has been precisely imaged in the European mind. The Sahara is extended south to make a continent of sand-dunes and oases and at some point in the eighteenth century tropical rain forests replace the deserts. More recently, tourist promotions and television reports have competed with one another for the authentic image of Africa: luxurious safaris across the game-…
Australian and New Zealand fiction has a distinctive flavour. Partly it must be down to the physical qualities of Australasia; vast deserts and mountain ranges, surrounded by a fringe of farmland and cities, flanked by sand and sea; a continent composed entirely of islands, as remote from its colonizer as it is possible to be—with the opposite seasons, even the opposite day and night. A cou…
Twentieth-century fiction in America, Europe, Africa, and Asia has all been much concerned with racial themes and issues, from Camus to Ralph Ellison, from Primo Levi to Alice Walker. This essay takes a specific area of fiction dealing with such themes, and looks at some favourite examples. Caribbean and African-American writers of fiction have always been preoccupied with racial themes. This, I b…
While readers might expect Canadian fiction to be about canoeing or the wilderness, they are more likely to discover urban landscapes, complex characters, and psychological tension. Canadian writing is as varied as the country's multicultural, multiracial, and multigeographical dimensions. Readers will encounter many voices and styles, as well as a sweep of thematic concerns, some of them i…
With its rich literary heritage—French, Spanish, Dutch, and oral—Caribbean literature is not best served by focusing on one tradition to the exclusion of others; talking about the English literature of the Caribbean might seem to legitimize certain old colonial arrangements which still disfigure the region. Also, it limits literary cross-cultural discussion that may be valuable. An e…
Before Charles Dickens children were scarcely seen or heard in novels, and never in a central role: Dickens placed them in the centre of the stage. Particularly through his boy-heroes in the eponymous novels Oliver Twist (1837–9), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9), and David Copperfield (1849–50), and through perhaps the greatest of all, Pip in Great Expectations (1860–1), he …
However well-read, one always feels ill-read. There are familiar ways of dealing with nervousness on the subject. ‘Have you read the latest Salman Rushdie?’ someone asks. ‘I know it’, one replies, without specifying whether that means ‘I've scrutinized the text from cover to cover and could go head-to-head with Magnus Magnusson’ or (more likely) &#x…
The other day, I read a report in the local newspaper of the American city where I live. A 19-year-old youth who had just split up with his girlfriend went home and took his father's revolver, returned to the girl's house, and murdered her and a friend she had called over to talk about the break-up. No, actually I made that up (never trust a crime writer), but if you read a headline …
In the preface to The Forsyte Saga (1922) John Galsworthy remarks of his title: ‘the word Saga might be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic’ How the mighty have fallen! At the start of the twenty-first century, in literary circles, the word ‘saga’ is, if not exactly contemptuous, belittling. We have Aga sagas, even lager sagas, and of course, family sa…
Fantasy fiction was established in modern times as a popular genre, for most readers, by the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien's two classics, The Hobbit (1937) and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), created the format of extensive adventures set in a world similar to that of ancient legend and fairy-tale, and populated by creatures such as elves, dwarves, trolls, …
People who go on to read a novel after first seeing the screen adaptation frequently complain that the original (especially if it's a classic) is slower and ‘heavier’ than the film it inspired, and it usually is. Someone who first made acquaintance with Shakespeare through Luhrmann's excellent, action-packed, streetwise but distinctly slimline version of William Shakesp…
One way into reading French literature is to think of yourself going on holiday to France. To begin with you might choose a favourite city like Paris, tried and tested on weekend hops, easily accessible, full of famous landmarks. As well as visiting the great historic sites you'd want to make time for the classics of contemporary life: shopping and nightclubbing. Later on you might start wa…
In 1895, the year in which his masterpiece Effi Briest was published, Germany lost its great novelist of the late nineteenth century, Theodor Fontane. Observing the new nation (united in 1871 under Prussian leadership), Fontane had taken his amiably ironic scalpel to the fledgeling Reich's foundation myths, the gulf between its conservative and progressive instincts, and its class and gende…
The Glamour novel, at the time of writing, is in eclipse. The Zeitgeist is inner fulfilment rather than outer show, and this particular sub-genre of romantic fiction deals in breathtaking excess. Stakes are always high here, and emotions searing. There should be moments of pure melodrama—for instance, the central scene in Shirley Conran's Lace (1993), in which a young model asks the …
Thirty years or so ago, the historical novel had dropped below the horizon of respectable attention. The romantic gestures that thrilled Victorian readers had dwindled into the folderol of swashbucklers and bodice-rippers in pulp fiction, kitsch movies and television serials. Before long, a host of gleeful parodists from Monty Python to Blackadder would deliver the coup de grâce to this ris…
There is sometimes a section called ‘humour’ in bookshops. It's usually full of books (often illustrated) that are specifically designed to make people laugh. I always find such books rather sad. One of the nicest things about really great humorous story-tellers is that they usually don't consciously try and make you chuckle. It's simply that the way they see the…
India has sixteen official languages and, compared to the major literatures which exist in, for example, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, and Malayalam, Indian fiction in English is a newcomer to the literary scene. Its beginnings are usually linked to the publication of R. K. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1935), and Raja Rao's Kant…
Irish fiction proper could be said to begin with Maria Edgeworth's sprightly Castle Rackrent of 1800, which concerns itself with ‘the manners of the Irish Squires, before the Year 1782’. As a dissection of profligacy and imprudence, satirically framed, this work stands alone; and its central emblem, the ramshackle ‘big house’ itself, sparked off an entire traditi…
The term magic realism was originally applied to French and German surrealist artists in the 1920s. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was the first to use it in relation to fiction, in the prologue to The Kingdom of This World (1949), his novel about the Haitian Revolution. In this, Carpentier fused realism with Afro-Caribbean folk traditions to convey a history of oppression and slavery, a world …
‘Reader, I married him.’ In perhaps one of the most quoted (and misquoted) of fictional resolutions, Charlotte Brontë brings to a close a novel which an interested publisher had requested to be ‘wild, wonderful and thrilling’. It is the finale of an emotional and physical journey brought to a conclusion by that most prosaic of rites of passage: marriage. Yet it i…
Russian literature mainly developed from the late eighteenth century as the country's social and political conscience. Repeatedly since then, writers have reworked key historical events and relived tragic political epochs. Their constant question is: how should we live? Any reader who works through the great novels chronologically will see this question echoing self-consciously down the gen…
Comic book adventure stories in which the unpronounceable meets the incomprehensible and battle ensues? Or a visionary blend of science and philosophy? Both descriptions apply. Science fiction (sf) is a vast and accommodating genre; flexible enough to include the thriller, the romance, the adventure story, horror, and even the historical novel. The differences between the popular television series…
Joseph Conrad was without doubt the greatest writer of the sea. In an essay he wrote in 1898 called ‘Tales of the Sea’ he looked back fondly on the two sea novelists who had thrilled him as a boy, and who, in effect, initiated the genre of the sea novel. The novels of the Englishman Captain Marryat are ‘the beginning and embodiment of an inspiring tradition’. But there …
There are three things you notice when you look at the novels that have charted and changed our ideas on sexual politics. First, how fast they date. Second, most of the books that caused the greatest scandals in their day are now unreadable. Third, how rare it is for the protagonists in even the very best and most enduring books to know pleasure without punishment, sex without death. Why is this? …
To name even a fraction of the writers of short stories who deserve mention is impossible within the scope of this short essay and so my choice has had to be ruthless and even arbitrary. I have tried to stick to first thoughts: writers I return to, stories that have lingered in my mind. Good novels tend to leave one feeling full and satisfied while good short stories whet the appetite for more. Bu…
The novel has always demonstrated how the human subject intersects and interacts with the social, and one of the most important functions of the novel has been its acting as an instrument of social critique. Novelists have often been possessed by strong partisan political visions (frequently socialist) of how society should fare. Conservative and right-wing novels are far less usual. For an archet…
There have been spies ever since there have been competing states. There have even been spies who were writers; for example William Wordsworth, in the late eighteenth century, was being paid by the Home Office when he travelled through northern Germany and France, to report back on what was going on in Europe in that turbulent revolutionary period. But it is only at the beginning of the twentieth …
The supernatural is one of the most difficult of all literary genres to define. It is less a genre in its own right than a mass of sub-genres that can include ghost stories and tales of terror; horror stories; macabre, grotesque, or weird fiction, and other sub-species of the fantastic in literature. For those who wish to begin exploring this vast and diverse region of fiction, the best approach i…
Teenagers read everything. Some will be into Dostoevsky, others are fans of Point Horror. They can be enjoying Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh on a Monday and Agatha Christie on a Tuesday. They will veer between the good and the ghastly; the intellectually challenging and the frankly silly. Other categories in this volume, especially Supernatural, Humour, Crime, and Science Fiction, list book…
A thriller is the literary equivalent of the theme park white-knuckle ride. Stomach-churning suspense, heart-stopping fear, and the ever-present sense of jeopardy are all there, as well as that visceral uncertainty at the back of our reptile brains about whether we're all going to make it out of here alive. There are the dramatic highs, where everything seems held motionless at the point of…
American fiction is not simply an off-shoot of English literature, but a separate tradition altogether, arising out of what was then a completely new experience: settling the wilderness and building up the institutions and social structure of a western country from scratch. The pilgrim fathers (and mothers) were English people, it is true, but they were refugees, disillusioned with the past, hopef…
It became a cliché of late-twentieth-century feminism that men needed to become more like women: getting in touch with their feelings, the better to empathize, understand, and support. But war fiction shows men doing precisely that, whilst at the same time committing acts of atrociously insensitive violence. Which is one reason why more women should read war fiction. So why is the war novel…
Few other fictional genres can rival the Western in popularity, for reasons not altogether clear. True, the characters are simple and familiar, plots are rarely complicated, and the setting is so consistently spectacular that it has lent its name to the genre (unlike any other). Yet why should the image of a horseman packing a gun so have fascinated a post-industrial culture? Perhaps an answer lie…