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.

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.

A reference guide to the work of 115 modern British and American critics.

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.

A major new survey of literature in England during the first half of the twentieth century, Chris Baldick places modernist with non-modernist writings, high art with low entertainment. The Modern Movement ranges broadly covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, children's books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life.

Today's student of literature is faced with an overwhelming variety of critical approaches. The need to evaluate their usefulness in furthering our understanding of literature is therefore a growing concern. In Literary Meaning, Wendell V. Harris explores the fallacies behind the fashionable hermeticism that insists that the meaning of a text is indeterminate and divides language from any reality beyond itself. Harris then puts forward a powerful case for the return to hermeneutics, in which an understanding of the author's intended meaning is the first step in reading, and at the same time insists upon the hollowness of the current mode of professionalism in literature departments. Set to provoke fierce debate, this controversial book will become essential reading for all those involved in literary criticism.