Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1989, this novel combines aspects of romance fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy to freshen the telling of a double set of complex relationships. Reminiscent of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by… Read More ›
This first volume of an informal trilogy introduces the recurring settings of Rummidge University and Euphoria State and the characters Philip Swallow, a mild-mannered British professor of English literature, and Morris Zapp, a brash American scholar and literary critic. This… Read More ›
The 10th of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the story of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he returns to a peace-time life at the end of World War II…. Read More ›
Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism. The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes… Read More ›
Written as the first-person narration of a Dublin student who relishes multiple approaches to the representation of reality, this antirealistic novel presents a narrator living with an insufferably conventional uncle. The young man has reason to resent his uncle’s inquisitiveness:… Read More ›
Dr. Samuel Johnson once claimed that “nothing odd can last.” As an example, he cited Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which had temporarily fallen from favor. Over two centuries later, that same novel may well… Read More ›
American literary Postmodernism flourished in the period after World War II, though most critics place its inception in the late fifties and early sixties. It was a reaction to the times: the end of World War II, Hiroshima and the… Read More ›
Though the term metalanguage—a language that describes or analyzes another language— was in use well before the 1960s, it was around this time that theorists including Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics [1960]) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957] and Elements of… Read More ›
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
When white light hits glass one of two things can happen. Either you have an image, which is faithful if somewhat unexciting, or you have a glorious spectrum which though beautiful is rather a distortion. Light from the past passes… Read More ›
Although John Barth’s (1930 – ) novels have ensured his eminence among contemporary American writers, his short fictions have been no less influential or controversial. In addition to his novels, he published a collection of shorter works, Lost in the… Read More ›
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