The novels
A Question of Upbringing(1951), A Buyer's Market (1952), The Acceptance World (1955), At Lady Molly's (1957), Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), The Kindly Ones (1962), The Valley of Bones (1964), The Soldier's Art (1966), The Military Philosophers (1968), Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), Temporary Kings (1973), Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury (1932 –2000) was a British author and academic.
Born in 1932, the son of a railwayman in Sheffield, his family moved to London in 1935, returning to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School until 1950 when he went to University College, Leicester, getting a first-class degree in English in 1953. He continued his studies at Queen Mary College, where he gained his M.A. in 1955. Between 1955 and 1958 he moved between teaching posts with the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the USA. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation, completing his first novel Eating People is Wrong in 1959 while in hospital. He married Elizabeth Salt, with whom he would later have two sons, and took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books. From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He completed his Manchester University Ph.D. in American studies in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched an M.A. in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was knighted in 2000.
Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. In 1986 he wrote a short humorous book titled Why Come to Slaka?, a parody of travel books, dealing with the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange.
He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy and The Gravy Train (another exploration of life in Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man.
His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities - the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors - which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.
Selected bibliography: Eating People is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1968), The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971), Who Do You Think You Are — a collection of short stories, The History Man (1975), Rates of Exchange (1990), To the Hermitage (2000), Mensonge (1987), The Modern American Novel (1983), Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Cuts (1987) — a Hutchinson Novella, Doctor Criminale (1992), The Modern British Novel (1993)
The late works by Iris Murdoch and William Golding: look through Lecture 2.
The New Wave of science fiction (Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, James Graham Ballard).
New Wave science fiction was characterised by a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, and a highbrow and self-consciously "literary" or artistic sensibility previously comparatively alien to the science fiction aesthetic. The term "New Wave" is borrowed from film criticism's nouvelle vague: films characterised by the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and others. It was later applied to 1970s punk rock in the UK and to new wave music. The New Wave writers saw themselves as part of the general literary tradition and often openly mocked the traditions of pulp (primitive and popular) science fiction, which they regarded as stodgy, irrelevant and unambitious.
Growing as a trickle more than a flood, New Wave began in 1964, when Michael Moorcock took over as editor for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. While the American magazines Amazing Stories with Cele Goldsmith as editor and the respected The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction which had from the very start had a leaning towards unusually literary stories, Moorcock turned that into a concerted policy. No other science fiction magazine sought as consistently to distance itself from traditional science fiction as much as New Worlds. By the time it ceased regular publication it had more or less transcended the science fiction genre, styling itself as an experimental literary journal.
The content of New Wave rejected the core concerns of traditional science fiction ("outer space"), in favour of a focus on taboo breaking and a more people focused approach ("innerspace"). Central concerns (and of William S. Burroughs, before it) of the New Wave was entropy, the idea that the universe (and human societies) will irrevocably run down, as well as a fascination with mass media itself.
The New Wave also had a political subtext. Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock and other key figures in the British New Wave came from various Marxist and socialist political traditions; their disdain for genre SF was partly a manoeuvre against American cultural hegemony and what the New Wavers considered "conservatism" in "Campbellian" SF with its faith in, and obsession with, technoscience. In the U.S., the New Wave would be closely associated with opposition to the Vietnam War and leftwing political activism.
The New Wave peaked around 1971.
Michael John Moorcock (born December 18, 1939) is a prolific English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock's most popular works by far have been the Elric novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné. In these books, Elric is an anti-hero written as a deliberate reversal of what Moorcock saw as clichés commonly found in fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a direct antithesis of Robert E. Howard's Conan. Moorcock has also published a number of parodies of writers for whom he felt affection as a boy, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and Howard himself. All his fantasy adventures have elements of satire and parody while respecting what he considers the essentials of the form. While these are perhaps his best known works in the U.S., he came to prominence in the UK as a literary author, with books like Behold the Man and The Final Programme being received as non-generic. Novels like the Cornelius Quartet, Mother London, King of the City, and the Pyat Quartet have established him in the eyes of critics in publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books as a major contemporary literary novelist.
His work is frequently praised as being complex and multilayered. Central to many of his fantasy novels is the concept of an "Eternal Champion," who has potentially multiple identities across multiple dimensions of reality and alternative universes. This cosmology is called the "Multiverse" within his novels. The "Eternal Champion" is engaged in a constant struggle with not only conventional notions of good and evil, but also in the struggle for balance between Law and Chaos. Thus the criticism of metanarratives common in post-modern critical theory finds its expression in a form widely read and understood at a variety of levels.
One of Moorcock's popular creations is Jerry Cornelius (another JC), a kind of hip secret agent of ambiguous sexuality; the same characters featured in each of several Cornelius books. These books were most obviously satirical of modern times, including the Vietnam War, and continue to feature as another variation of the Multiverse theme.
Since the 1980s, Moorcock has tended to write longer, more literary 'mainstream' novels, such as Mother London and Byzantium Endures, which have had positive reviews, but he continues to revisit characters from his earlier works, like Elric, with books like The Dreamthief's Daughter or The Skrayling Tree. With the publication of the third and last book in this series, The White Wolf's Son, he announced that he was 'retiring' from writing heroic fantasy fiction, though he continues to write Elric's adventures as graphic novels with his long-time collaborator Walter Simonson. He has also completed his 'Colonel Pyat' sequence, dealing with the Nazi Holocaust, which began in 1981 with Byzantium Endures, continued through The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992), and now culminates with The Vengeance of Rome (2006).
Although Moorcock is mostly known for the books mentioned above, he also wrote several novels and novellas which are set on Earth millions of years in the future, most well known in The Dancers at the End of Time. His award-winning Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen, while set in an alternate Earth history, is not strictly a fantasy novel.
Major New Wave works: The Elric sequence (1963-1991), including: The Stealer of Souls (1963), Stormbringer (1965, revised 1977), Elric of Melniboné (1972), The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate (1976), The Vanishing Tower (1977), Many other Eternal Champion books including the Hawkmoon and Corum sequences, Behold the Man (1966), The Black Corridor (1969), The Ice Schooner (1969), The Chinese Agent (1970), The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Dancers at the End of Time sequence (1972-76).
Brian Wilson Aldiss, (born August 18, 1925 in East Dereham, Norfolk) is a prolific English author of both general fiction and science fiction. His byline reads either Brian W. Aldiss or simply Brian Aldiss. Greatly influenced by the SF pioneer, H. G. Wells, Aldiss is a Vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society.
Major New Wave works: Hothouse (1962) Set in a far future Earth, where the earth has stopped rotating, the Sun has increased output, and plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay, like a tropical forest enhanced a thousandfold; a few small groups of humans still live, on the edge of extinction, beneath the giant banyan tree that covers the day side of the earth. Originally published as a series of novelettes in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the magazine editor actually sought scientific advice about one aspect of the book. He was told that the orbital dynamics involved meant that it was nonsense, but the image of the earth and moon side by side in orbit, shrouded with cobwebs woven by giant vegetable spiders, was so outrageous and appealing that he published it anyway. Science fiction fans endorsed this decision, voting it a Hugo Award. The original (and substantially abridged) American edition was titled The Long Afternoon of Earth; according to Aldiss's account, the publisher insisted on this so that the book wouldn't be put amongst the horticulture books in bookshops.
The Dark Light Years (1964): the encounter of humans with the utods, gentle aliens whose physical and mental health requires wallowing in mud and filth, who are not even recognised as intelligent by the humans.
Greybeard (1964) Set decades after the Earth's population has been sterilised by a burst of radiation from an astronomical event, the book shows an emptying world, occupied by an ageing, childless population.
Frankenstein Unbound (1973) A 21st century scientist, a creator of a technological monster himself, is transported to 19th century Switzerland where he encounters both Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. It was the basis for the somewhat flawed 1990 film of the same title, directed by Roger Corman.
James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film.
The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.
Novels of the New Wave period:
The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) (also The Drought) (1965), The Crystal World (1966), The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (also Love and Napalm: Export USA)) (1972), Crash (1973),Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).
Short Story Collections
The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962), Billenium (1962), Passport to Eternity (1963), The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963), The Terminal Beach (1964), The Impossible Man (1966), The Venus Hunters (1967), The Overloaded Man (1967), The Disaster Area (1967), The Day of Forever (1967), Vermilion Sands (1971).
The major figure of traditional SF in English literature of the second half of the 20th c on a level with A. Clarke was John Brunner.
John Kilian Houston Brunner (1934 –1995) was born at Preston Crowmarsh in Oxfordshire, and went to school at Cheltenham. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, under the name of Gill Hunt, but did not write full time until 1958. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, and married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 1958-07-12.
At first writing conventional space opera, he later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and is now considered a classic of the genre. The Jagged Orbit won the British SF Award in 1971.
Brunner's best-known work is perhaps 1975's proto-Cyberpunk The Shockwave Rider, in which he coined the term "worm", used to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network.
His pen names include: K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, and Keith Woodcott.
The diversity of the contemporary mainstream canon in Great Britain (Catherine Cookson, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, Peter Ackroyd, Maeve Binchy, Jeffrey Archer, Anita Brookner).
CATHERINE COOKSON 1906-1998
Catherine Cookson is probably the best known and most prolific of all North Eastern English writers. Her novels combine human warmth, pathos, comedy and tragedy, and are told in a powerful narrative style. She published over 90 highly popular novels which have been translated-into twenty languages, among others into Finnish (over 30 works). In the 1990s Cookson's books have sold 90 million copies. Cookson became especially famous for her family sagas set against the backdrop of England in the 19th century. She wrote under the pseudonym Catherine Marchant, and produced three different series of books: the Bill Bailey series, Mary Ann series, and the Mallen series.
Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, Co. Durham, an industrial region in the northeast of England on June 27, 1906. Unlike so many leading writers, she started life with many disadvantages. She was born illegitimate. Her mother was a poverty-stricken woman, at times an alcoholic and occasionally violent. Cookson had only the minimum of education. For many years Cookson believed that she had been abandoned as a baby and that her mother was actually her elder sister.
From an early age Cookson was determined to become a writer. She was an avid reader and wrote, her first short story, The Wild Irish Girl, when she was eleven, and sent it off to the South Shields Gazette, which returned it after three days. At the age of thirteen Cookson left school. She began working as a maid in the houses of the rich and powerful, witnessing the great class barrier inside wealthy society. From 1924 to 1929 she worked in a laundry and saved enough money to establish an apartment hotel in Hastings. One of the tenants was a local grammar-school master Tom Cookson, whom she married in 1940 at the age of 34. After several miscarriages she fell into a depression and started writing to recover. She joined the local writers' group for encouragement. During this period she changed from play writing to short stories. Cook-son's first book, Kate Hannigan (1950), was partly autobiographical. Her neighbours tried to stop its publication because Cookson dared in the first pages to write in detail about a baby being born. In the story Kate, a working-class girl, becomes pregnant by an upper-middle-class man. The child is brought up by Kate's parents and she believes them to be her real parents, and Kate to be her sister.
Colour Blind (1953) is a story of a woman who marries a black man. Later their daughter suffers at the hands of classmates and a bitter uncle. The background is realistic, and offers an understanding picture of the British working class. In these early works as in the following books Cookson dealt with such social issues as class tensions and unemployment, among them The Black Candle (1989), set in the 19th-century and depicting a clash between two families.
Her first sixteen books Cookson wrote longhand, but started then to use a tape recorder, acting the parts of the characters she was writing about. Her husband worked as her private secretary and helped with grammar and spelling. Cookson's dialect was so strong that many outsiders had difficulties in understanding what she said. In 1968 her novel The Round Tower won an award as the best regional novel of the year. Cookson's autobiography, Our Kate, was published in 1969.
Many of Cookson's novels concern the poverty in the North East of England, and are set in mines and shipyards, or the farms and surrounding countryside in various periods from the nineteenth century onwards. The historical background is generally carefully researched. Her novels are about hardship, the intractability of life and of individuals, the struggle first to survive and next to make sense of one's survival. Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson's virtues, in a world that she often depicts as cold and violent. She also used her own experiences of illegitimacy and poverty as material and recollections of her family and friends. Several novels are serialized, tracing events in the life of a single character or a family. Mary Ann Shaughnessy, a brave and warm-hearted heroine, appears in many books. Her other major series are The Mallen Family, Tilly Trotter, Hamilton, and Bill Bailey.
Usually Cookson's characters cross the class barrier by means of education. Tilly Trotter is taught to read and write by the parson's daughter and Kate Hannigan is educated by a kindly employer. Often Cookson's characters are outcasts, as Tilly who is viewed by the local villagers as a witch. During the story, beginning in the reign if the young Queen Victoria, she moves up and down the social scale. She becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, then the wife of his son. Exceptionally Tilly moves to the United States, Texas, which Cookson had never visited.
"But he had taught her to love, and that was a different thing; he had taught her that the act of love wasn't merely a physical thing, its pleasure being halved without the assistance of the mind. But it was Mr. Burgess, this old man breathing his last here now, who had taught her how to use her mind. Right from the beginning he had warned her that once your mind took you below the surface of mundane things, you would never again know real peace because the mind was an adventure, it led you into strange places and was forever asking why, and as the world outside could not give you true answers, you were forever groping and searching through your spirit for the truth." (from Tilly Trotter Wed, 1981).
The trilogy dealing with the Mallen family saga began with The Mallen Streak (1973), and continued with The Mallen Girl (1974), and The Mallen Lot (1974). The story is set in 19th-century Northumberland, and depicts the affairs of the family against the background of past hidden sins.
Cookson received the Freedom of the Borough of South Shields, and an honorary degree from the university of Newcastle, and the Royal Society of Literature's award for the Best Regional Novel of the Year. The Variety Club of Great Britain named her Writer of the Year, and she was voted Personality of The North-East. In 1933 Cookson was made Dame.
Dame Catherine, who was born into poverty, died one of Britain's wealthiest women in her home near Jesmond Dene, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, at 12.30pm, shortly before her ninety-second birthday, on June 11, 1998. Dame Catherine was revered on Tyneside, and South Tyneside Borough Council now markets itself as "Catherine Cookson Country."
Latest novels of Catherine Cookson are: Fenwick House, The Silent Lady, Rosie of the River, The Simple Soul, and Just a Saying.
Posthumously published Kate Hannigan's Girl (1999) continues the story of her first novel.
Even though her first novel was not published until almost half-way through her life, Dame Catherine sold more than 100 million books in 30 different countries.
The success of her books, which centred mostly on the Tyneside she grew up in, remained undiminished by modern life.
Best-selling author Barbara Taylor Bradford praised the work of a fellow writer: "I think she did what a novelist was supposed to do. She entertained, she brought human emotion to the paper."
The chairman of the Romantic Novelists' Association, Angela Arney said: "She was held in very high esteem. She didn't just write romantic novels but social history."
MURIEL SPARK (1918-2006)
Dame Muriel Spark is the Scottish born writer. She was born in Edinburgh and educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls, then at Heriot-Watt College. She is a long-time resident in Rome, Ital. She became a Catholic in 1954 and many of her satirical commentaries on modern life are coloured by her Roman Catholic faith. Muriel Spark travelled to South Africa, spent several years in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and married there Sydney Oswald Spark, a school teacher, in 1938. The marriage was dissolved and she returned to England in 1944 and worked in the Foreign Office as an anti-war and anti-Nazi propagandist.
Her first interest was in poetry when she created her poem Out of a Book for which she was awarded the Sir Walter Scott prize.
Spark's professional literary activity began in 1950s with the works about Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and William Wordsworth.
Her first collection of stories came out in 1958 under the title The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories. She is a good psychologist and shows the atmosphere of hypocrisy, snobbism and greediness of petty bourgeoisie. In 1954 Muriel began her work on the novel, The Comforters, which was published in 1957 and is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, Caroline Rose, having to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism.
She then made an impact with the novel, Robinson (1958), which, curiously enough, like Golding's Lord of the Flies, owes something to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. January Marlow and two other survivors of a plane crash spend three months on an island inhabited only by Robinson and his servant. Robinson, a semi-mythical figure - benefactor, host and provider, yet also governor and director -withdraws for a space to contrive temporary freedom for the survivors, and their relationships reenact passages from January's past. In Memento Mori (1959) aged characters have the tenor of their ways shaken by intermittent telephone calls reminding them that they must die. Thus Muriel Spark subjects her characters to specialized laboratory conditions that intensify aspects of the inescapable human condition - they are marooned in exile or under threat of mortality. Her narrative is wry, blunt, and provocatively funny.
Her little worlds become microcosms of the larger reality. Dimensions of awareness are lightly opened up. The Devil turns up, at a London factory, in the shape of a lively Scotsman in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). The Bachelors (1960) is a quieter study of what the title suggests: the intrusion of the unknown. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) is the study of an Edinburgh eccentric school teacher (admired, but later disenchanted by her pupil), whose methods challenge authority and subject her favourite pupils to over-pressurized hot-house development, socially and sexually. The book carries several of the Spark trademarks: a taut, nervy, controlled style; precise characterization; a deadly accurate wit which entertains and appals at the same time. There is autobiographical material here, as in the much later novel, Loitering with Intent (1981).
Her other novels include The Public Image, reflecting the movie world in a classical setting (1968), The Driver's Seat, billed as "an ethical shocker" (1970), Not to Disturb, set on the banks of Lake Geneva (1971), The Hothouse by the East River in which most of the characters are already dead being killed during World War II when their train was bombed (1973), The Abbess of Crewe which is a send-up of the Nixon Watergate scandal (1974), Territorial Rights (1979), The Only Problem (1984). Spark's shorter fiction has been collected in The Stories of Muriel Spark (1985), and she has also written poetry and literary criticism. The historical subject is dominating in her book Aiding and Abetting (2002). Muriel Spark is retelling the story of Lord Lucan who went missing suspected of the murder of his children's nanny.
Muriel Spark is a witty writer with an epigrammatic crispness in dialogue. Technically she engineers time shifts and modes of presentation with adroitness. She is the distinguished woman of letters, whose scores of books over more than half a century have consistently delighted and satisfied readers across several continents. Whether in poetry, short story, or novel, Muriel Spark's writing is taut, crisp, concise, and always filled with wit.
The human conditions she explores may have dimensional openness to the possibility of the extra-naturalistic, but she steers well clear of mechanical allegory or over-contrived symbolism. Her imaginative worlds exist in their own right. She is considered to be a representative of the critical realism in the newest English literature. Spark won popularity as a novelettist or short-story writer. But the basis of her views is rather contradictory. On the one hand she tried to show the absurdity of human life and its fatalism. On the other hand she represents herself as a writer, who knows the morality, psychology of the "middle class"; she reflects the atmosphere of hypocrisy and snobbism of bourgeois society. She writes about the absence of moral values and spiritual emptiness and cynicism of the contemporary people. Her literary world is peopled by ordinary, familiar characters and frequently features powerful and iron-willed women.
Spark was appointed OBE (Officer of British Empire) in 1967 and has been awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Strathclyde (1971) and the University of Edinburgh (1989).