Kirjahaku

With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896)—a freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents, by the time she was thirty Blind had become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she was widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues (such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory), and she subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and indeed a leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siècle, most notably Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Feuerbach and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siècle.

Understanding Martin Amis is a comprehensive guide to the novels, short stories and non-fiction by one of Britain's most highly acclaimed and controversial authors. Building on the first edition, of 1995, James Diedrick draws on personal interviews, reviews and criticism to map the distinctive features of Martin Amis's imaginative landscape - the sociosexual satire of ""Money"" and ""Yellow Dog"", the bold experimentation of ""Time's Arrow"" and ""Night Train"", and the provocative blend of autobiography and cultural analysis in ""Experience"" and ""Koba the Dread"". Diedrick illustrates how Amis has reshaped the British literary landscape, expanding its stylistic and thematic range while creating forms adequate to the experience of postmodernity. Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis's work, rooted in Amis's relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed his father's political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son's outlook and writing. Diedrick also identifies two complementary impulses in Amis's work. The first is journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation. Besides analyzing the ways Amis's fiction forges the topical into the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis's considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.