English Literature

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English Literature English Literature Read widely. As well as your set texts you will need to read other works by the same author and key works of the period/genre. Beyond that follow your own literary interests. There are some ideas below to get you started, and the Reading for Fun page gives ideas for some quality contemporary titles. To keep up-to- date, it is also worth reading the journals, following book prizes and attending literary festivals. Hay-on-Wye is the Glastonbury for book lovers. Literary Criticism & Non-Fiction Poetics, Aristotle Shakespeare on Toast, Ben Crystal Myths and Legends, Anthony Horrowitz This is Shakespeare, Emma Smith The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli The Elizabethan World Picture, E M W Tillyard Verse Soul of the Age, Jonathon Bate Beowulf The Gothic (Blackwell Guides to Literature), David John Milton (Paradise Lost) Punter and Glennis Byron Geoffrey Chaucer (try The Pardoner’s Tale) Doing English, Robert Eaglestone Andrew Marvell The Poetry Handbook, John Lennard John Donne Critical Terms for Literary Study, Frank Lentricchia William Wordsworth The Force of Poetry, Christopher Ricks John Keats An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and William Blake Theory, A Bennett Alfred Tennyson English Literature in Context, P Poplawski Robert Browning The Short Oxford History of English Literature, A Sanders Elizabeth Barrett Browning The Art of Fiction, David Lodge Samuel Taylor Coleridge Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton Thomas Hardy Christina Rossetti Jonathon Swift Wilfred Owen Lawrence Sterne TS Eliot Henry Fielding Dylan Thomas Fiction: Early C19th – Romantic & Gothic Alan Ginsberg Jane Austen Simon Armitage Mary Shelley Seamus Heaney Fiction: C19th – Victorian Carol Anne Duffy Thomas Hardy Benjamin Zephaniah Emily Bronte Drama Charles Dickens Samuel Beckett William Thackeray Alan Bennett Charlotte Bronte Bertolt Brecht Elizabeth Gaskell Jez Butterworth George Eliot Anton Chekhov Fiction: Early C20th – Science Fiction Shelagh Delaney H G Wells Brian Friel Aldous Huxley Henrik Ibsen George Orwell Arthur Miller Fiction: Early C20th – Modernist Harold Pinter James Joyce William Shakespeare D H Lawrence George Bernard Shaw Virginia Woolf Richard Brinsley Oscar Wilde Sheridan Polly Stenham Fiction: Post-war C20th & C21st Sam Shephard P G Wodehouse Tom Stoppard John Fowles John Webster Kazuo Ishiguro Tennessee Williams Susan Hill Timberlake Wertenbaker Jeanette Winterson Oscar Wilde Sebastian Faulks Fiction: C18th - Early Novelists Angela Carter Daniel Defoe Pat Barker Zadie Smith Fiction: North American Literary Prizes Mark Twain Wellcome Book Prize John Steinbeck Man Booker Prize F Scott Fitzgerald Orwell Book Prize Joseph Heller James Tait Black Memorial Prizes Henry James International Dylan Thomas Prize Ernest Hemingway Rathbone Folio Baillie Gifford Alice Walker Forward Prize for Poetry Toni Morrison Saltire Society Journals Hodder English Literature Review Times Literary Supplement Websites http://poetrysociety.org.uk/ https://literaryreview.co.uk/ https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ https://www.writersinspire.org/ Podcasts A Good Read, BBC Radio 4 Book Club, BBC Radio 4 Literary Festivals Oxford (oxfordliteraryfestival.org/) Port Eliot (porteliotfestival.com/) Aldeburgh (aldeburghbookshop.co.uk/page/the-Aldeburgh-literary-festival) Edinburgh (edbookfest.co.uk) Cheltenham (cheltenhamfestivals.com/literature) Hay-on-Wye (hayfestival.com) Women’s Prize for Fiction Costa Book Prize .
Recommended publications
  • What Does It Mean to Write Fiction? What Does Fiction Refer To?
    What Does It Mean to Write Fiction? What Does Fiction Refer to? Timothy Bewes Abstract Through an engagement with recent American fiction, this article explores the possibility that the creative procedures and narrative modes of literary works might directly inform our critical procedures also. Although this is not detailed in the piece, one of the motivations behind this project is the idea that such pro- cedures may act as a technology to enable critics to escape the place of the “com- mentator” that Michel Foucault anathematizes in his reflections on critical dis- course (for example, in his 1970 lecture “The Order of Discourse”). The article not only theorizes but attempts to enact these possibilities by inhabiting a subjective register located between fiction and criticism—a space that, in different ways, is also inhabited by the two literary works under discussion, Renee Gladman’s To After That and Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One. (Gladman’s work also provides the quotations that subtitle each half of the essay.) Readers may notice a subtle but important shift of subjective positionality that takes place between sections I and II. 1 “What Does It Mean to Write Fiction? What Does Fiction Refer to?” These two questions are not mine—which means that they are not yours, either. They are taken from a work of fiction entitled To After That by the American writer Renee Gladman. I hesitate to call them a quotation, for, although they appear in Gladman’s book, the questions do not exactly belong to her narrator; or rather, they do not belong to the moment of Gladman’s narration.
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    A STARING CONTEST WITH THE SELF: KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD, LINGUISTIC INQUIRY AND WORD COUNT, AND EXPLANATORY STYLE by COLTON TYLER ROYLE THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at the University of Texas at Arlington December, 2018 Arlington, Texas Supervising Committee: James E. Warren, Supervising Professor Desiree Henderson Timothy R. Morris ii ABSTRACT Shame as an emotional response in the late 2010s has been discussed in both high and low sectors, from a high level of shame with social media use in high school classrooms, to the lack of shame by the president of the United States. My thesis addresses the topic by analyzing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s two autobiographical works, My Struggle and his Seasonal Quartet. Readers, critics, and Knausgaard himself have described his work as a focus on the shameful moments of his life. Using positive psychology’s term “explanatory style,” coined by Martin E.P. Seligman, I do a structural reading of explicit moments of shame. Combining this with computer text-analysis software, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, devised by James Pennebaker, I create a thorough reading of shame in Knausgaard’s work. The thesis addresses the question of shame’s effect on the style of writing for the multiple volumes, as well as document possible moments of pessimistic mental health. I conclude that Knausgaard operates in typical literary arcs, regardless of his self-proclaimed thesis statement, and I discuss the importance of emotional changes in Knausgaard’s work. Copyright by Colton Tyler Royle 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the ongoing work and instruction of the tenured faculty of The University of Texas at Arlington.
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  • White Teeth / Zadie Smith About the Book…
    White Teeth / Zadie Smith About the Book… Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth‐challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late‐in‐life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. About the Author… Zadie Smith was born in 1975 and grew up in Willesden, in North London, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father. She graduated from King's College, Cambridge, in 1997. White Teeth, her first novel, is a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, The Guardian First Book Award Winner, and Whitbread First Novel Award Winner.
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  • Multicultural World in Zadie Smith's Recent Novels Multikulturní Svět V
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  • Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel
    Notes Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel 1. Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Harmony Books, 1989), 24. 2. The full text of Tony Blair’s 1999 speech can be found at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/460009.stm (accessed on December 9, 2008). 3. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Perseus Books, 2003), 16. 4. Ibid. 5. Peter Hitchcock, “ ‘They Must Be Represented’: Problems in Theories of Working-Class Representation,” PMLA Special Topic: Rereading Class 115 no. 1 January (2000): 20. Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst have also pointed out that “Over the past twenty-five years, this sense that the working class ‘matters’ has ebbed. It is now difficult to detect sustained research interest in the nature of working class culture” (97). 6. Gary Day, Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 202. This point is also echoed by Ebert and Zavarzadeh: “By advancing singularity, hetero- geneity, anti-totality, and supplementarity, for instance, deconstruction has, among other things, demolished ‘history’ itself as an articulation of class relations. In doing so, it has constructed a cognitive environment in which the economic interests of capital are seen as natural and not the effect of a particular historical situation. Deconstruction continues to produce some of the most effective discourses to normalize capitalism and contribute to the construction of a capitalist-friendly cultural common sense . .” (8). 7. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 404–405 (Hereafter, Lost Causes). 8. Andrew Milner, Class (London: Sage, 1999), 9. 9. Gavin Keulks, ed., Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73.
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  • The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair's London Orbital and Zadie
    The Report Committee for Nicole Ashley Iverson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Mia Carter Co-Supervisor: Casey A. Boyle Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW by Nicole Ashley Iverson, B.A. Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to Alan Jacobs, who introduced me to Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith during his final year of teaching at Wheaton College. I am also deeply grateful to Casey Boyle, Mia Carter, Kathleen Stewart, and Hannah Wojciehowski for their generous feedback on multiple versions of this project. Thank you to a kind audience member at Rice University’s “Reconceptualizing Narrative” conference who asked a great question about Zadie Smith’s formal choices in NW that challenged me to write more about genre. Finally, thanks to my parents, for their unflagging encouragement, and to Austin, for being a willing and thoughtful reader along the way. iii Abstract Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW Nicole Ashley Iverson, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisors: Mia Carter and Casey Boyle In World City, Doreen Massey traces how two strong narratives about London have dominated political rhetoric about the city since the 1960s, creating a rigid “geographical imagination” that has been perpetuated through the government and business up to the contemporary moment.
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  • Understanding Zadie Smith's White Teeth Using Judith
    A SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY: UNDERSTANDING ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH USING JUDITH BUTLER’S PERFORMATIVITY AND JANE AUSTEN’S SATIRE A Thesis Presented To The Faculty of the Department of English East Carolina University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Masters of English Literature by Elizabeth E.E. Howland July, 2009 ©Copyright 2009 Elizabeth E.E. Howland A SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY: UNDERSTANDING ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH USING JUDITH BUTLER’S PERFORMATIVITY AND JANE AUSTEN’S SATIRE by Elizabeth E.E. Howland APPROVED BY: DIRECTOR OF DISSERTATION:___________________________________________ Dr. Thomas Douglass, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER:__________________________________________________ Dr. Anne Mallory, PhD COMMITTEE MEMBER:__________________________________________________ Dr. Marianne Montgomery, PhD CHAIR OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH: ________________________________________________ Dr. Ron Mitchelson, PhD DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL: ________________________________________________ Paul J. Gemperline, PhD ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Tom Douglass for his support, insights, and incredible patience throughout the writing of this thesis. His enthusiasm and encouragement were vital to the completion of this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Anne Mallory and Dr. Marianne Montgomery for their helpful suggestions throughout the revision process. To all of you, thank you for believing in me. DEDICATIONS I would like to dedicate this to my parents, Gene and Barbara Howland. Throughout my life, they have been supportive and enthusiastic. Their guidance and support was essential to my college career, from the first days of Physics to the final days of Literary Theory. Their faith and confidence in me continues to see me through. I am eternally grateful to them for all they do.
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  • “Transatlantic Relations in Zadie Smith's on Beauty”
    UC Santa Barbara Journal of Transnational American Studies Title Green-Card American Fiction: Naturalizing Novels by Visiting Authors Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f2168s7 Journal Journal of Transnational American Studies, 5(1) Author Abele, Elizabeth Publication Date 2013 DOI 10.5070/T851007116 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f2168s7#supplemental Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Green-Card American Fiction: Naturalizing Novels by Visiting Authors ELIZABETH ABELE In 1868, Sir Charles Dilke made this prediction about US culture: “America is becoming, not English merely, but world-embracing in the variety of its type; and, as the English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral dictatorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue.”1 Regardless of whether Dilke was merely attempting rhetorically to extend the influence of a declining British empire, this view is echoed in Salman Rushdie’s 2001 novel Fury, as his Indo-British protagonist Malik Solanka proclaims his “American-ness”: “Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world’s playing field, its rule book, umpire and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand.”2 Both Dilke’s and Rushdie’s words characterize American ideology as seductive, ensnaring people beyond its borders. While Solanka may proclaim the entire world as “American,” this virtual citizenship may be even more seductive for citizens of Anglophone countries, who experience American cultural imperialism in a language very close to their own.
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  • City and Nature in the Work of Zadie Smith
    Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith Grey and Green: City and Nature in the work of Zadie Smith Freya Graham Introduction In her riotous novel NW (2012), Zadie Smith takes us on a walk through North London. It’s a cacophony: “sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk!”.1 The narrative continues over a page, taking in “TV screens in a TV shop”, “empty cabs” and a “casino!”.2 Plant and animal life are almost entirely absent, aside from a moment of “birdsong!” and a building surrounded by “security lights, security gates, security walls, security trees”.3 Elements that we may associate with the “natural world” have become part of the architecture of the city, indistinguishable from the man-made lights, gates and walls. NW is so centred on city life that the title itself takes inspiration from a London postcode. The novel follows the lives of four friends—Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan— who grow up on the same estate in north-west London. As the friends grow older, their lives overlap in unexpected ways. Leah works in a dead-end job and still lives near her childhood estate; Natalie seemingly triumphs in becoming a successful lawyer and mother; Felix, a former drug addict, is forging a new life; Nathan is involved in organised crime. The novel’s ambitious narrative threads culminate in a tragic chance encounter. NW expands on the themes of class, race, identity and place which Smith first explored in her debut novel, White Teeth (2000).
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  • Engaged, Multicultural Individualism in the Millennial Works of Maryse Condé and Zadie Smith
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses March 2019 ENGAGED, MULTICULTURAL INDIVIDUALISM IN THE MILLENNIAL WORKS OF MARYSE CONDÉ AND ZADIE SMITH Nicole Calandra University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Calandra, Nicole, "ENGAGED, MULTICULTURAL INDIVIDUALISM IN THE MILLENNIAL WORKS OF MARYSE CONDÉ AND ZADIE SMITH" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1510. https://doi.org/10.7275/nqqg-9021 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1510 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ENGAGED, MULTICULTURAL INDIVIDUALISM IN THE MILLENNIAL WORKS OF MARYSE CONDÉ AND ZADIE SMITH A Dissertation Presented by NICOLE M. CALANDRA Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2019 Comparative Literature © Copyright by Nicole M. Calandra 2019 All Rights Reserved ENGAGED, MULTICULTURAL INDIVIDUALISM IN THE MILLENNIAL WORKS OF MARYSE CONDÉ AND ZADIE SMITH A Dissertation Presented by NICOLE M. CALANDRA Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________
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  • Reading London's Suburbs: from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith
    Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–34245–4 © Ged Pope 2015 Photographs © Salim Hafejee 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–34245–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
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  • Inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith's NW
    ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 42.2 (December 2020): 180-196 e-issn 1989-6840 DOI: http://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2020-42.2.09 © The Author(s) Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence “I am the sole author”: Inauthenticity and Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW Beatriz Pérez Zapata Tecnocampus (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Valencian International University [email protected] This article examines the role of intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and the novel’s questioning of authorship, authenticity and identity. Relying on intertextual and postcolonial theories, the article lays bare how Smith’s novel questions the fixity and stability of selves and how she situates herself as an inherently intertextual author disrupted by others and potentially disruptive of (post)colonial ways of being and one that plays with notions of (in)authenticity and originality. For this purpose, the article pays attention to the novel’s intertextual links with the historical case of the Tichborne claimant and Jorge Luis Borges’s fictionalisation of it in the short story “Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,” included in the collection A Universal History of Infamy (1933). Moreover, the article focuses on the theorisation of infamy, understood as the disruption of hegemonic narratives brought about by marginal characters and discourses. Keywords: intertextuality; authenticity; authorship; postcolonialism; Zadie Smith . “Soy la única autora”: inautenticidad e intertextualidad en NW de Zadie Smith Este artículo explora el papel de la intertextualidad en la novela NW (2012) de Zadie Smith y cómo esta cuestiona los conceptos de autoría, autenticidad e identidad.
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