Routledge Revivals
2 total works
This book, first published in 1977, is not about Bloomsbury, lesbianism, madness or suicide, but is a much-needed introduction to Virginia Woolf’s nine novels, written in the hope of turning attention back from the life to the fictional work. Its clarity and insights will make this book invaluable to a student embarking on a study of Virginia Woolf as a novelist, and to all those whose interest has been aroused by the continuing publication of biographical material. It will, moreover, increase the enjoyment, not only of enthusiasts, but also of those who have hitherto, found her a ‘difficult’ writer.
On its original publication in 1982 this book was the first full-length study of Philip Roth as a major twentieth-century writer. As well as setting the novelist's work in the context of Jewish-American writing (and Jewish-American families) and twentieth-century American politics, the book explores the characteristic paradoxes in Roth: self-disgust and self-consciousness, restraint and letting go, nausea and appetite, energy and frustration, stylishness and vulgarity, surrealism and the mundane.
Roth is a highly literary and referential character and an assessment is made of the conflicting influnces on his work of Kafka, Checkov, Gogol, Henry James, Melville and Henry Youngman, a Jewish nightclub and Vaudeville comic. In addition a close examination of his anxious, revolting, garrulous heroes, their mothers, their marriages, their shrinks, and their shiksas is undertaken and a deep seriousness is discovered, co-existing with Roth's comic brashness and bravura.