Kirjahaku

Contrary to popular belief, Paul Scott was not a historical novelist in the realist tradition but a post-modernist who engaged with his readers in narrative of increasing self-consciousness and complexity. Having exposed the identity crisis of the twentieth-century male under army and post-war conditions, he moved on after the 1950’s to explore the need for commitment memorably and often brilliantly against various backdrops. This phase culminated in his most frankly experimental novel, The Corrida at San Feliu (1964). However, India, where Scott had served during the war, still exerted a strong pull on his imagination. And in his tour de forceThe Raj Quartet (1966-1975), and its coda, Staying On (1977; Booker Prize, 1978), Scott found in one of the great upheavals of recent times what he had long been seeking – evidence of human being’s capacity for moral integrity and love, even in the face of extraordinary challenges.

George Meredith was a lyrical yet searingly honest poet, and an influential novelist whose fiction distilled, contributed to and animated the major debates of the Victorian age. He became at once an arbiter of taste in his own times, and a trailblazer for modernism. In many ways an extraordinary, larger-than-life figure, he has always had his admirers, and critics have continued to be drawn to the biographical, socio-political, scientific and experimental aspects of his oeuvre. Some of his works, including the sonnets ofModern Love, his ‘Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit’, and novels like The Egoist, have attained the status of classics. The present study focuses on such works, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century.

A lively exploration of the time spent and work written in Surrey by authors from John Evelyn and Fanny Burney to H.G Wells and E.M Forster. Special chapters on Country Writers, Box Hill and the River Mole, Children's Writers (up to Jacqueline Wilson) and "The Quill and the Sword" (Surrey writers in times of war). Contains suggestions for further reading and details about places to visit.