The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in literary fashions and tastes? In answering these questions, the book examines texts by a wide range of modern novelists and poets, including James Joyce, T.S.Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin, and draws on the work of literary theorists from Roman Jakobson to Roland Barthes. Written in Lodge's typically accessible style this is essential reading for students and lovers of literature at any level. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new Foreword/Afterword by the author.

A comprehensive, accessible and lucid coverage of major issues and key figures in modern and contemporary British literature.

David Lodge is internationally celebrated as a novelist and critic, and, more recently, as a writer for television. This study examines his work from The Picturegoers (1960) to Therapy (1995). There are chapters on Lodge's early, mainly realistic, fiction; on his trilogy of campus novels, Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work; and on his interest, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes deeply serious, in Catholicism, notably in How Far Can You Go? and Paradise News. Lodge's practice as a novelist has been paralleled over the years by his work as a literary critic and theorist who is keenly interested in fictional form. There is an account of his critical writing, and the study concludes with an assessment of Lodge's achievement as a best-selling novelist with intellectual interests in criticismand theology, who has successfully brought together observant realism, metafictional consciousness and dazzling comedy.

Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In Special Delivery, Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire. Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, and Jacques Derrida's The Post Card. She then turns to three novels by women who are more preoccupied with politics than passion: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. By juxtaposing these "women's productions" with the men's "production of Woman," Special Delivery dismantles the polarities between male and female, theory and fiction, high and low culture, male critical theory, and feminist literary criticism. Kauffman demonstrates how all seven texts mercilessly expose the ideology of individualism and romantic love; each presents alternate paradigms of desire, wrested from Oedipus, grounded in history and politics, giving epistolarity a distinctively postmodern stamp.

Between Human and Divine is the first collection of scholarly essays published on a wide variety of contemporary (post 1980) Catholic literary works and artists. Its aim is to introduce readers to recent and emerging writers and texts in the tradition.

Ivan Jablonka’s History Is a Contemporary Literature offers highly innovative perspectives on the writing of history, the relationship between literature and the social sciences, and the way that both social-scientific inquiry and literary explorations contribute to our understanding of the world. Jablonka argues that the act and art of writing, far from being an afterthought in the social sciences, should play a vital role in the production of knowledge in all stages of the researcher’s work and embody or even constitute the understanding obtained. History (along with sociology and anthropology) can, he contends, achieve both greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary experience through a broad spectrum of narrative modes. Challenging scholars to adopt investigative, testimonial, and other experimental writing techniques as a way of creating and sharing knowledge, Jablonka envisions a social science literature that will inspire readers to become actively engaged in understanding their own pasts and to relate their histories to the present day. Lamenting the specialization that has isolated the academy from the rest of society, History Is a Contemporary Literature aims to bring imagination and audacity into the practice of scholarship, drawing on the techniques of literature to strengthen the methods of the social sciences.

Indeholder analyser af forfatterens omfattende forfatterskab fra 1902 til 1946, samt 3 stykker, ikke tidligere publiceret på engelsk: Realism in novels, American language and literature, og A poem about the end of war