Kirjahaku

This book offers an accessible critical introduction to the work of Graham Swift, one of Britain’s most significant contemporary authors. Through detailed readings of his novels and short stories from 'The Sweet Shop Owner' (1980) to 'The Light of Day' (2003), Daniel Lea lucidly addresses the key themes of history, loss, masculinity and ethical redemption, to present a fresh approach to Swift.This study proposes that one of the side-effects of modernity has been the destruction of traditional pathways of self and collective belief, leading to a loss of understanding between individuals about their duties to each other and to society. Swift's writing returns repeatedly to the question of what we can believe in when all the established markers of identity - family, community, gender, profession, history - have become destabilised. Lea suggests that Swift increasingly moves towards a notion of redemption through a lived ethical practice as the only means of finding solace in a world lacking a central symbolic authority.

This book offers readings of five of the most interesting and original voices to have emerged in Britain since the millennium as they tackle the challenges of portraying the new century. Through close readings of the work of Ali Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall and Jon McGregor, Daniel Lea opens a window onto the formal and thematic concerns that characterise a literary landscape troubled by both familiar and unfamiliar predicaments. These include questions about the meaning of humanness in an age of digital intercourse; about the need for a return to authenticity in the wake of postmodernism; and about the dislocation of self from the other under neoliberal individualism. By relating its readings of these authors to the wider shifts in contemporary literary criticism, this book offers in-depth analysis of important landmarks of recent fiction and an introduction to the challenges of understanding the literature of our time.

This book offers readings of five of the most interesting and original voices to have emerged in Britain since the millennium as they tackle the challenges of portraying the new century. Through close readings of the work of Ali Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall and Jon McGregor, Daniel Lea opens a window onto the formal and thematic concerns that characterise a literary landscape troubled by both familiar and unfamiliar predicaments. These include questions about the meaning of humanness in an age of digital intercourse; about the need for a return to authenticity in the wake of postmodernism; and about the dislocation of self from the other under neoliberal individualism. By relating its readings of these authors to the wider shifts in contemporary literary criticism, this book offers in-depth analysis of important landmarks of recent fiction and an introduction to the challenges of understanding the literature of our time.

George Orwell is a writer who has been appropriated by very different political regimes and opinions, pressed into service as his various critics have seen fit. Though a polemicist and satirist at heart, his anti-totalitarian ideals are expounded with deft story-telling and a simplicity that belies the ultimately complex debates to which he gave voice. The changing responses to his two classic novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), provide an illuminating account of the developing preoccupations of the second half of the 20th century.In this Readers' Guide, Daniel Lea takes a decisive path through the maze of interpretations that has accumulated around Orwell's best-known novels, examining critical reactions from the beginning of the Cold War through to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, and at the same time placing Orwell within a long tradition of dystopian writings. In exploringthe artistic, cultural and social contexts of Orwell's work, it is an essential resource for students and general readers alike.