Henry Green : class, style and the everyday /
This book 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 firs...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
2016.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | This book 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 ongoing 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, interwar, postwar 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 195 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [173]-190) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780198734758 (hbk.) 0198734751 (hbk.) |