Language, History, and Metanarrative in the Fiction of Julian Barnes explores the ways in which Barnes develops these themes in five of his most important works: Metroland; Before She Met Me; Flaubert's Parrot; A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters; and The Porcupine."--Jacket.

Julian Barnes's work has been marked by great variety, ranging not only from conventional fiction to postmodernist experimentation in such well-known novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters (1989), but also from witty essays to deeply touching short stories. The responses of readers and critics have likewise varied, from enthusiasm to scepticism, as the substantial volume of critical analysis demonstrates. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the essential criticism on Barnes's work, drawing from a selection of reviews, interviews, essays and books. Through the presentation and assessment of key critical interpretations, Vanessa Guignery provides the most wide-ranging examination of his fiction and non-fiction so far, considering key issues such as his use of language, his treatment of history, obsession, love, and the relationship between fact and fiction. Covering all of the novels to date, from Metroland (1981) to Arthur and George (2005), this is an invaluable introduction to the work of one of Britain's most exciting and popular contemporary writers.

A Study Guide for Julian Barnes's "Melon," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

Julian Barnes is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates his work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy. It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but along the way it also shows how certain key thematic preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory). Chapters provide detailed readings of each major publication in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes’s fiction, including art, authorship, history, love and religion. The book is very lucidly written, and it is also satisfyingly comprehensive - alongside the 'canonical' Barnes texts, it includes brief but illuminating discussion of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of the fictions of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George also benefits from archival research into his unpublished materials. The book will be a useful resource for scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates working in the field of contemporary literature.

This comprehensive introduction places the work of Julian Barnes into historical and theoretical context. Including a timeline of key dates, this guide explores his characteristic literary techniques, offers extensive readings of all 10 novels and provides an overview of the varied critical reception his work has provoked.

Proceedings of 3rd Interdisciplinary Conference on English Studies

From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of A Sense of an Ending comes a comedy of sexual awakening in the 1960s that is “wonderfully fresh, crackling with nostalgic irreverence” (Vogue). Only the author of Flaubert's Parrot could give us a novel that is at once a note-perfect rendition of the angsts and attitudes of English adolescence, a giddy comedy of sexual awakening, and a portrait of the accommodations that some of us call "growing up" and others "selling out.

The sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations develop and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformations within the last decades. This book traces the accelerating emergence of cultural crossovers and overlaps in a global perspective and through a variety of disciplinary approaches. It starts from the premise that after the ‘spatial turn’ human action and cultural representations can no longer be grasped as firmly located in or clearly demarcated by territorial entities. The collection of essays investigates postcolonial articulations of various genres and media in their spatiality and locatedness while envisaging acts of location as dynamic cultural processes. It explores the ways in which critical spatial thinking can be made Productive: Testing the uses and limitations of ‘translocation’ as an open exploratory model for a critically spatialized postcolonial studies, it covers a wide range of cultural expressions from the anglophone world and beyond – literature, film, TV, photography and other forms of visual art, philosophy, historical memory, and tourism. The extensive introductory chapter charts various facets of spatial thinking from a variety of disciplines, and critically discusses their implications for postcolonial studies. The Contributors’ essays range from theoretical interventions into the critical routines of postcolonial criticism to case studies of specific cultural texts, objects, and events reflecting temporal and spatial, material and intellectual, physical and spiritual mobility. What emerges is a fascinating survey of the multiple directions postcolonial translocations can take in the future. This book is aimed at students and scholars of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, transnational studies, globalisation studies, critical space studies, urban studies, film studies, media studies, art history, philosophy, history, and anthropology. Contributors: Diana Brydon, Lars Eckstein, Paloma Fresno-Calleja, Lucia Krämer, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Martinek, Sandra Meyer, Therese-M. Meyer, Marga Munkelt, Lynda Ng, Claudia Perner, Katharina Rennhak, Gundo Rial y Costas, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, Silke Stroh, Kathy-Ann Tan, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Jessica Voges, Roland Walter, Dirk Wiemann.

The social novel is the traditional haunt of the liberal conscience. What does the triumph of the New Right mean for this type of fiction in Britain and the US? Should the liberal left seek consensus or assertion? This book examines these issues, and assesses the state of both nations, as well as that of the contemporary novel.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A, University of Silesia, 86 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In my thesis I elaborate on the literary creativity of Julian Barnes. My paper consists of two chapters entitled Language as Identity and Difference and History in Time and Space. The predominating part of each chapter is devoted to the position of individuals competing with meta-narratives of language, history, politics, religion, and culture. The ultimate outcome of the protagonists' proceedings is ambivalent in the sense that their efforts are successful only to some extent. However, at the same time, I illustrate that by opposing domination the protagonists manage to undermine the assumed rationale of social discourses and revise the long-established hierarchies of western values. In the first chapter, we have to do with a broad spectrum of ambiguities connected with the usage of language. Barnes's representation of linguistic reality comprises elements of both structural and poststructural linguistics. The author's analysis is based on the writings of many different philosophers and linguists such as: Wolfgang Iser, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The subsequent part of the same chapter is devoted to the problem of fragmented narration- mainly with respect to Flaubert's Parrot. In the second chapter, I elaborate on the status of history in Barnes's novels. It is focused on the interrelations between history and society as well as history and individuals. This sort of research profile leads to posing further questions about the master-narratives that encapsulate the image of God and the vision of the whole world- in temporal and spatial terms. This interpretation is performed with the help of some French philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. The theoretical account of the linguistic and