James H. Reid

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the difference, and fundamental incompatibility, between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. James Reid shows how the major novelists, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot (rather than remembered) the reality of their socio-historical world. He questions recent critical approaches which have tended to reduce the realist novel to individual or historically determined narratives or speech acts. He demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the difference, and fundamental incompatibility, between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. James Reid shows how the major novelists, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot (rather than remembered) the reality of their socio-historical world. He questions recent critical approaches which have tended to reduce the realist novel to individual or historically determined narratives or speech acts. He demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

This book assesses the achievements of East German writers, placing their work in the context of the vicissitudes of cultural politics and East-West relations. It identifies the major themes of East German literature, such as the search for self-realisation, the questioning of official assumptions on the achievements of 'real socialism', and a concern to view the GDR in the framework of its own past as well as that which it shares with its Western neighbour.

This is the first in-depth study of the complete work of Heinrich Bll, one of the best known writers of postwar Germany. Bll became passionately invloved in the political upheavals and debates of his time, and all the major issues are reflected in his writings. His works were invariably provocative and were critically received in both academic and non-academic circles. Abroad he had the solid reputation of the "good German" who unambiguously condemned fascism and the less appealing features of the land of the Economic Miracle. In 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first German to be so honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929, and his books sell by the millions. This study not only places Bll's writings in the context of contemporary political, social and literary developments but, at the same time, can be read as a lively history of the federal Republic.