This collection of essays explores the strange and intense relationship between history and artistic form during the 1940s. The essays cover a comprehensive range of issues, including the Blitz, spying, demobilisation, traumatic loss, nostalgia for the pre-war years, addiction, and the formation of sexual identity. The writings of both well-known and neglected authors are discussed in detail.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to fiction in the English-speaking world during the period from 1970 to the present day. During this period, a sea change has transformed fiction in English, and this collection introduces the key developments as well as the works of some of the most important writers today.

This important new book provides a comprehensive introduction to British fiction from 1979 to the present. The volume outlines the main developments in contemporary fiction and engages with key themes such as cultural identity, gender, myth and history, post colonialism and urban culture. In a series of lively and accessible essays, key critics introduce a broad range of leading British writers, including Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith. Offering an illuminating analysis and contextualization of British fiction today, this...

This critical study of Hardy's short stories provides a thorough account of the ruling preoccupations and recurrent writing strategies of his entire corpus as well as providing detailed readings of several individual texts. It relates the formal choices imposed on Hardy as contributor to Blackwood's Magazine and other periodicals to the methods he employed to encode in fiction his troubled attitude towards the social politics of the West Country, where most of the stories are set. No previous criticism has shown how the powerful challenges to the reader mounted in Hardy's later stories reveal...

This collection of essays explores the strange and intense relationship between history and artistic form during the 1940s. The essays cover a comprehensive range of issues, including the Blitz, spying, demobilisation, traumatic loss, nostalgia for the pre-war years, addiction, and the formation of sexual identity.