Nick Bentley Livres

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important debates in the criticism and research of contemporary British fiction. Nick Bentley analyses the criticism surrounding a range of British novelists including Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson. Exploring experiments with literary form, this authoritative book considers cutting-edge concerns relating to the neo-historical novel, the relationship between literature and science, literary geographies, and trauma narratives. Engaging with key literary theories, and identifying present trends and future directions in the literary criticism of contemporary British fiction, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers and scholars.

This book provides a critical survey and evaluation of Martin Amis' major works, identifying his commitment to stylistic expression and experiment alongside the ways in which his novels have engaged with social, cultural and political issues.

This book takes a fresh look at English fiction produced in the 1950s. By looking at a range of authors, some canonical, some less well known, it shows that the novel of the period was far more diverse and formally experimental than previous accounts have suggested. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary literary and cultural theories, the author examines the way in which issues and anxieties in 1950s society were articulated and addressed in fiction. These issues include the reformulation of Englishness in a rapidly decolonizing world; anxieties about immigration, racism, class and classlessness; new configurations of gender; and the fear of the Americanization of working-class culture, especially in the way it appeared to be influencing English youth. The first part of the book identifies some of these anxieties, and the response to them in non-fiction and writing by the emerging New Left. The second part contains a theoretically informed reading of important Fifties novels by Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Muriel Spark, Alan Sillitoe, Colin MacInnes and Sam Selvon.