Novelists Against Social Change

Novelists Against Social Change studies the writing of John Buchan, Dornford Yates and Angela Thirkell to show how these conservative authors put their fears and anxieties into their best-selling fiction. Resisting the threats of change in social class, politics, the freedom of women, and professionalization produced their strongest works.

Before 1840 there was little prestige attached to the writing of novels, and most English novelists were women. By the turn of the 20th century, 'men of letters' acclaimed novels as a form of great literature, and most successful novelists were men. Here, Gaye Tuchman examines how men redefined this form of literary expression.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The figure of the wartime child in the mid-twentieth century unsettles and disturbs. This book employs a range of material – biographical, literary and historical – to chart some of the surprising and unanticipated crossovers between women’s writing and early psychoanalysis in the years of the Second World War and the decades before and after. This volume includes examples of children’s adventure fiction, as well as works written for adult audiences and important and previously unrecognized similarities are noted. The war was a disruptive influence in the lives of all who lived through it. Although active self-censorship is observed in the behaviour and attitudes of adults at this time, this book demonstrates how fictional children are able to articulate feelings such as anxiety and fear that adults were under pressure to conceal or to repress and at times, the figure of the wartime child becomes a surrogate for the writer herself or her suppressed fears and anxiety. When peace returned, this study finds women writers quick to identify and communicate a discomfiting new ambivalence between parents and children.

Raja Rao Is An Erudite Scholar And An Ennobling Indian Novelist In English. His Sensibility Is Verily Indian And Presents A Unified Vision Of Life.His Creditable Career As A Novelist, Beginning With His First Novel Kanthapura (1938), Spans Over Almost More Than Half A Century. The Novel Is A Repository Of The Eventful Phases Of Indian S Struggle For Independence On Gandhian Lines. The Novel Merits The Distinction Of Being A Paradigmatic Text With The Deft Handling Of Myth And History.The Serpent And The Rope (1960) Renowned For Its Metaphysical Moorings Is A Compendium Of The Indian Composite Cultural Complexities Interacting As They Do With The Cross Cultural And Transactional Influences. The Text Holds Out Infinite Possibilities For The Intending Readers Set Out To Undertake A Serious Study.The Cat And Shakespeare (1965), Comrade Kirillov (1976) Are Intact With The Solidity Of An Inbuilt Structural Irony And Put Up An Amazing Picture, In An Amusing Manner, Of The Piquant Situation Obtaining All Over India In The Post-Independence Period, Soon After The Euphoria Of Independence Struggle Ceased To Exercise Its Influence.The Study Being Selective, Is Confined To Socio-Cultural Aspects Of Life As Reflected In The Above Texts.

Bhabani Bhattacharya Is One Of The Remarkable Novelists In The Realm Of Indo-English Fiction. This Anthology Containing Twenty Articles By Dedicated Indian Scholars Deals With Almost All The Significant Aspects Of Bhattacharya S Fictional World. All The Six Novels Focussed Upon Are : So Many Hungers!, Music Of Mohini, He Who Rides A Tiger, A Goddess Named Gold, Shadow From Ladakh, A Dream In Hawaii. It Is Hoped That Present Critical Study Will Be Helpful To The Teachers, Research Scholars And Students For Recent Studies On Bhabani Bhattacharya.

Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These--together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe's writing--are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa's most populous nation. Drawing on interviews with Nigeria's writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels--from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces--Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern. Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.