Overview
Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday offers a critical prism through which Green's fiction--from his earliest published short stories, as an Eton schoolboy, through to his last dialogic novels of the 1950s--can be seen as a coherent, subtle, and humorous critique of the tension between class, style, and realism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going critical recognition that Green's work is central to the development of the novel from the twenties to the fifties, acting as a vital bridge between late modernist, inter-war, post-war, and postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of the everyday. Consequently, each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy of the writing, whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended, purposefully ambiguous nature of its symbols; the shifting, cinematic nature of Green's prose style; the sensitive, but resolutely unsentimental depictions of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period; the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life; or the ways in which moments or events are rapidly subsumed back into the flux of the everyday, their impact left uncertain. Critics have, historically, offered up singular readings of Green's work, or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works, particularly those of the 1940s. Green's writing is, undoubtedly, poetic and extraordinary, but this book also pays attention to the clichéd, meta-textual, and uneventful aspects of his fiction.
Full Product Details
Author: Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.30cm
, Height: 1.70cm
, Length: 22.10cm
Weight: 0.362kg
ISBN: 9780198734758
ISBN 10: 0198734751
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 04 August 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
an intelligent, elegant book that takes the need for open-endedness as its premise. * Lara Feigel, Times Literary Supplement *
an intelligent, elegant book that takes the need for open-endedness as its premise. Lara Feigel, Times Literary Supplement
Author Information
Nick Shepley studied English at Keble College, Oxford, went on to do a PGCE, and became a VSO volunteer in Ondangwa, Namibia, before doing his MA and PhD at University College London. He has been teaching there ever since.
