Search results for ""author malcolm bradbury""

A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s.With an introduction by James Naughtie.Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That’s your problem-solving system . . . But haven’t we tried all that?Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard’s desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard’s wife, promiscuous ’70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood.Funny, disconcerting and provocative, Bradbury's classic novel brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his away around campus. But is also reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.

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From Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, leading critics Richard Ruland (American) and Malcolm Bradbury (British) address questions of literary and cultural nationalism. They demonstrate that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define America's cultural and social parameters. Above all, they argue that American literature has always been essentially modern, illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to Fitzgerald and Pound, to Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon.From Puritanism to Postmodernism pays homage to the luxuriance of American writing by tracing the creation of a national literature that retained its deep roots in European culture while striving to achieve cultural independence.

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The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury, is a collection of the finest short stories from our best loved authors, including Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, William Golding, Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, J. G. Ballard, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Rose Tremain, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro.'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression - in some ways the most modern of them all.'The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form. Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored collection is a brilliant portrait of the generation of writers who have immediately influenced the brightest, sharpest and most intriguing writers who continue to emerge today.Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and professor of American studies and creative writing. He was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to Literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year's Honours List. He died in 2000.

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Saul Bellow's Herzog is part confessional, part exorcism, and a wholly unique achievement in postmodern fiction. Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age. In a crumbling house which he shares with rats, his head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart.This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury'Spectacular ... surely Bellow's greatest novel'Malcolm Bradbury'A masterpiece ... Herzog's voice, for all its wildness and strangeness and foolishness, is the voice of a civilization, our civilization'The New York Times Book Review

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An exploration of the ideas, groupings and the social tensions that shaped the transformation of life caused by the changes of modernity in art, science, politics and philosophy

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Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context.A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.

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'My first intimation of the possibilities of fiction' Zadie SmithMore than a love story, A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts - in values, social class, and cultural perspectives - and the ingenuity of fate. Its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, visits Italy with her prim cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, where she meets the unconventional, lower class Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart.With an Introduction by Malcolm Bradbury

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Determined that her baby son Tom shall not share her fate and remain in slavery, Roxy secretly exchanges him with his playmate Chambers, the son of her master. The two boys' lives in the quiet Missouri town of Dawson's Landing remain entwined even though they take very different directions. The indulged Tom (now heir to a fortune rightfully that of Chambers) goes to Yale, where he learns how to drink and gamble, while Chambers looks set to remain a subservient drudge. But then a strange sequence of events begins - one in which the much-derided lawyer, 'Pudd'nhead' Wilson, has a key part to play - and changes everything. Darkly ironic, blending farce and tragedy, Pudd'nhead Wilson is a complex and fascinating depiction of human nature under slavery.

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'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others'When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. 'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable has since become a world-famous classic.This Penguin Modern classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.

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