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9781474401357

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"Barbara Hardy's account of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing is as witty and probing as the author she studies. Hardy writes with flair and compassion about a writer full of powerful contradictions. She sends the reader back to the novels newly alert to their tonic insights and their fierce comedy.-- ""Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge"" Barbara Hardy's brilliantly incisive reading of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction will be a revelation. In her hands Compton-Burnett's lethally laconic writing takes on poetic intensity and social meaning. Hardy reveals its Brechtian coolness, its simultaneously classical and postmodern complexity, its language games, its scandalously detached way of probing the scandalous. The secrets and lies, the power relations of everyday life exposed in the handing of a cup of tea or the cutting of a cake come alive for us. A startling narrative imagination, devastating and profound, a major novelist of our time, emerges from this tour de force of criticism.--University of London ""Isobel Armstrong"""

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Barbara Hardy, formally Professor of English Literature Emeritus, Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Welsh Academy, and Hon. Member of the Modern Languages Association.

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