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Provides an appraisal of Hamilton's major novels as well as his successful stage plays, Rope and Gaslight. This title draws on the views of a variety of commentators, including Michael Holroyd, Doris Lessing, Claud Coburn and many others as well as considering how Hamilton's political beliefs affected his work.
Penetrating biography of a fascinatingly contradictory writer who, despite a privileged background and early and sustained success, became increasingly embittered with the world. Doris Lessing calls him 'a marvellous novelist', Keith Waterhouse 'A riveting dissector of English life' and Nigel Jones makes excellent use of Hamilton's own letters and notes as well as his own highly perceptive insights. The Literary Review called Through a Glass Darkly 'One of the most stimulating biographies for years'.
Aldous Huxley decried "the horrors of modern 'pleasure,'" or the proliferation of mass produced, widely accessible entertainment that could degrade or dull the mind. He and his contemporaries, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys, sought to radically redefine pleasure, constructing arduous and indirect paths to delight through their notoriously daunting work. Laura Frost follows these experiments in the art of unpleasure, connecting modernism's signature characteristics, such as irony, allusiveness, and obscurity, to an ambitious attempt to reconfigure bliss. In The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking inter...
Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.
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