Salami presents, for instance, a critique of the self-conscious narrative of the diary form in The Collector, the intertextual relations of the multiplicity of voices, the problems of subjectivity, the reader's position, the politics of seduction, ideology, and history in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. The book also analyzes the ways in which Fowles uses and abuses the short-story genre, in which enigmas remain enigmatic and the author disappears to leave the characters free to construct their own texts. Salami centers, for example, on A Maggot, which embodies the postmodernist technique of dialogical narrative, the problem of narrativization of history, and the explicitly political critique of both past and present in terms of social and religious dissent. These political questions are also echoed in Fowles's nonfictional book The Aristos, in which he strongly rejects the totalization of narratives and the materialization of society.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the spring of 1736 four men and one woman, all traveling under assumed names, are crossing the Devonshire countryside en route to a mysterious rendezvous. Before their journey ends, one of them will be hanged, one will vanish, and the others will face a murder trial. Out of the truths and lies that envelop these events, John Fowles has created a novel that is at once a tale of erotic obsession, an exploration of the conflict between reason and superstition, an astonishing act of literary legerdemain, and the story of the birth of a new faith.

The ideal companion to the text and the film adaptation

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.