In Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction, 1928-1968 , Elizabeth Maslen reassesses fiction written by women between the granting of universal franchise and the advent of new-wave feminism. Through close readings of a wide range of novels, Maslen analyses how writers chose to represent such issues as pacifism and the threat of fascism, war, race and class, and gender, exploring in the process how the writers' priorities affect their decisions on how to write.

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

This study covers the full range of Doris Lessing's work and explores in detail both its form and content. From 'The Grass is Singing' through to 'Alfred and Emily' her main concerns are shown to have a remarkable continuity, both in her commitment to political and cultural issues and in her explorations of inner space.

This collection of original critical essays, newly available in paperback, launches an ambitious, long-term project marking out a new period and style in twentieth-century literary history.

This collection of essays offers a wide-ranging and provocative reassessment of the British novel's achievements after modernism. The book identifies continuities of preoccupation - with national identity, historiography and the challenge to literary form presented by public and private violence - that span the entire century.

The essays in this volume articulate the historical ground on which this artistic exploration of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism depends. They also elaborate the spectrum that connects them, in terms of their historical location and ideological emphases, and thus suggest the ways in which they are connected in terms of rhetorical discourse. The essays are governed by the sense that anti-Semitism has not been a unitary experience or event. Rather it is its varieties that are explored--rexactly those aspects that have made it so difficult to grasp, and that led to the wide-ranging events and murdering methods of the Holocaust. Thus the editors eschew the causal explanation of Hitler's Willing Executioners as they seek to provide more nuanced understanding. Murray Baumgarten directs the Jewish Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter Kenez teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bruce Thompson is a lecturer in History and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Elizabeth Taylor (1912–75) is increasingly being recognised as one of the leading English novelists and short story writers of the middle of the twentieth century. Successive generations of readers have delighted in her subtle and penetrating exposures of the vanities and self-delusions of everyday life, her special sensitivity to frustration and disappointment, and the marvellous freshness of her wit and humour. Now, to mark the centenary of her birth, Elizabeth Taylor: A Centenary Celebration presents several new critical assessments of her work by leading academics, together with a sizeable number of Taylor’s uncollected or unpublished writings: short stories, including the first and the last she completed, essays on writers and writing, and a selection of letters to various correspondents, including Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. Opening many previously unexplored perspectives on Taylor’s work, this volume will be essential reading for her admirers and for the wider study of the literature of her time.