Writers and their Work
2 total works
Graham Swift is among the foremost contemporary British writers, having published seven highly acclaimed novels which are widely read by students and general public alike. Waterland has become a modern classic, and Last Orders won the Booker prize for fiction in 2006. This study covers all Swift's novels to The Light of Day: it offers a close reading of each of the novels, exploring the innovative formal strategies and identifying such recurrent themes as the presence of the past in the present, the blurring of distinctions between 'history' and 'story', fact and fiction, and the possibilities of redemption in a contemporary social and emotional wasteland. For the most part set in an urban, middle-class, claustrophobic and loveless present, and focused on usually fraught relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, these recognisably postmodern novels are seen here as symptomatic of contemporary Britain: a world where, in the shadow of the nuclear holocaust, we approach 'the End of History, and only 'telling stories' seems to offer solace.
Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously 'metamorphic' social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy's 'satiric' worldview; his ironic humanism in the 'new Dark Age' of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a 'Postscript'