Synopses & Reviews
Available for the first time in the United States a new series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the mast recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Published in the U. K. by Northcote House in association with The British Council.
Synopsis
Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940's - his first stories were greeted by Sean O'Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England - V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering broadness without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the 'self'. Wilson's major books often concern 'creative breakdown': they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.
Synopsis
A lucid and accessible study of Angus Wilson, a magnificently eclectic novelist, who understood the theatricality of modern life, and provided maps of Englishness, maps of the anxious modern psyche and the post-war world.