Kirjahaku

Described by the late poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky as ""the best British author writing today"", Tim Parks is as prolific a journalist, critic and translator as he is a novelist. In this book, Gillian Fenwick explores Parks' body of work and maintains that Parks is the epitome of the modern man of letters. The novels that Parks set in his English homeland - such as ""Loving Roger"", ""Home Thoughts"", and ""Family Planning"" - are complex texts treading between tragedy and comedy. Fenwick asserts that Parks' heroes and heroines are real people who make readers empathize with them and their indecision. Parks' writing crosses genres as well as international boundaries. Fenwick argues that Parks' Italian sojourn brought a richness to his work. Wanting no part of saccharine treatments of la dolce vita, Parks has in ""Italian Neighbours"" and ""An Italian Education"" described ordinary, at times frustrating, life in Italy with a touch of cynicism. Parks establishes himself as an ""Englishman in Verona"" - he sees his home country with an increased objectivity but is not quite fully assimilated into his new country. At the same time, his time in Italy has allowed him a much broader, European perspective: his novels ""Shear"" and ""Europa"", which are set on the Continent and feature characters of several European nationalities, capture his enlarged European scope. From Parks's novels and nonfiction books to his translations and journalism, Fenwick reckons with Parks's full literary range and sheds light on the work of a versatile English writer whose international recognition is steadily growing.

This is a guidebook to the multifaceted career of the popular travel writer and historian. ""Traveling Genius"" surveys the half century of work by British writer Jan Morris, including more than fifty books and thousands of essays and reviews, from 1950s America via Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Sydney, and Hong Kong to her home in Wales. Internationally known as a travel writer, she has also distinguished herself across many other genres by writing history, autobiographies and biographies, and literary fiction and essays.Existing accounts of Morris' work are largely confined to reviews and magazine essays, and often concentrate on James Morris' sex change and transformation into Jan Morris. This is of course significant to the writing, and some critics detect a change of tone and style afterward, but a detailed analysis of how her writing works has not yet been undertaken. In ""Traveling Genius"", Gillian Fenwick fills that gap in the scholarship with the first study to explore the depths of Morris' complete body of work, utilizing close readings and archival research.Fenwick maintains that Morris' abilities as historian, biographer, novelist, journalist, essayist, and reviewer all come to bear in the travel writing that has defined and distinguished her international career. In her unique profiles of cities and nations, Morris has the ability to capture the spirit of a place and its culture without mere descriptions of tourist sites and activities, as illustrated in her best-selling works on Venice, Oxford, and Spain. Her historical volumes - and the groundbreaking Pax Britannica trilogy in particular - show her abilities to write for a popular audience while influencing the work and opinions of academics.