51 Result(s)
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British and Irish Literature
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Gender Studies
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Twentieth-Century Literature
Chapter
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Conclusion
I have said relatively little about the material aspect of Hollinghurst’s work, of his methods, or of those influences that he himself has acknowledged. And I have, with few exceptions, not contrived to situat...
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Introduction
Lord Charles Nantwich, the eccentric octogenarian of Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library, is certainly not lacking in unusual habits. In his world, phone calls are ended in midsentence,...
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Influence, Image, and the Movement of Time
It has perhaps been the millennial rise of the neo-modern, historical novel — from Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) — which has asked readers, once again, to consider ‘gene...
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The Poets of Our Time: Lateness and Pedagogical Influence in The Folding Star
At the centre of The Folding Star lies a poetry textbook with an enticing name: Poets of Our Time. ‘The thing about Our Time was that it was really Our Fathers’ Time’ Edward Manners realizes, after spying on his ...
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Spitting Images: Image, Text, and the Popular Press in The Line of Beauty
In the conspicuously static tableau vivant that opens The Line of Beauty, a socially naïve 20-year-old examines the display in a shop window on Gower Street, not far from University College London: ...
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Introduction: Feminine Occupations
‘I will begin by saying, for the encouragement of would-be writers, that there never was a greater opening for short stories than at present, for magazines multiply nowadays faster than do good writers.’ So be...
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Braddon, Broughton, and Specters of Social Critique
Victorian homes, like Victorian women, could earn reputations. The pervasiveness of Victorian ghost stories revolving around the haunted house point to the vulnerability of that location. In much of mid-Victor...
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Baynton and Mansfield’s Unsettling Women
In February 1913, Sydney was abuzz with excitement regarding ‘The Bush Girl’. A stage melodrama ‘entirely Australian [abounding] in sparkling incidents of bush life’, the play was packed with ‘picturesque scen...
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Sun-Worship and the Idolatry of Images: Derek Jarman, Philip Glass, and The Swimming-Pool Library
The thematic trajectory of The Swimming-Pool Library is outlined in an early scene in which William Beckwith first visits the elderly aristocrat Charles Nantwich at his home on Skinner’s Lane, not far from St Pau...
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Almost Always: Influence, Ecstasy, and Architectural Imagination in The Spell
In Hollinghurst’s first two novels, the portrayals of opera, film, and Symbolist art serve to unsettle the line of influence that connects one generation to the next and defines one generation in contrast to a...
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The Latterday Sortes Virgilianae: Confirmation Bias and the Image of the Poet in The Stranger’s Child
Perhaps even more thoroughly than Hollinghurst’s earlier fiction, The Stranger’s Child absorbs and redistributes the visual vocabulary of modern gay writing in a process first observed when Joseph Bristow noted t...
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Spinsters Re-Drawing Rooms in Gaskell’s Cranford
The labels of’ spinster’ and ‘old maid’, in Victorian rhetoric, indicated much more than years and marital status. To fail to marry was to be relegated to an almost-invisible social position, to face the trial...
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Possessing London: The Yellow Book’s Women Writers
While the domestic interior became a site freighted with ideological meaning in the mid-Victorian period, it was not the only location wherein Victorians attempted to reclaim a rigidly-defined social space.1 Lond...
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Conclusion: Woolf, Rhys, and Narratives of Obscurity
We begin in a room. It is full of books and a writing desk and a brown ring on the carpet left by a hot kettle.1 This room in which Virginia Woolf works is nothing like the quarters occupied by her predecessors. ...
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At Home with Jane: Placing Austen in Contemporary Culture
Where do we place Austen in contemporary culture? California? Amritsar? Or in a four-square red-brick house in the midst of the Hampshire countryside? On the one hand, adaptations and retellings from The Jane Aus...
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‘Bin Laden a Huge Jane Austen Fan’: Jane Austen in Contemporary Political Discourse
‘“Jane Austen and &” books abound’, writes Richard Jenkyns, discussing her readers’ interest in knowing as much as they can about Austen and her social context.1 Jenkyns follows his observation with a relatively ...
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Introduction
In her classic essay on ‘Austen cults and cultures’, Claudia L. Johnson explains that its focus is on ‘the uses to which we have put [Austen] and her achievement’.1 John Wiltshire also invokes the term ‘use’ in h...
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‘England’s Jane’: The Legacy of Jane Austen in the Fiction of Barbara Pym, Dodie Smith and Elizabeth Taylor
Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1951), Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949) and Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian (1946) are all strongly influenced by Jane Austen and were published in the immediate aftermath of ...
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New Approaches to Austen and the Popular Reader
‘No one who read it closely was ever comforted by an Austen novel’, declares Hilary Mantel tartly in her contribution to the 2007 anthology Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English and American Lite...
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Letters to Jane: Austen, the Letter and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing
In 2005, Nina Bawden published a series of letters to her dead husband, Austen Kark, who was killed in the Potters Bar train crash. The letters explain the legal wrangles that followed the inquest into the acc...
