Encyclopedia of Literature: Patrick Kavanagh Biography to Knocknarea Sligo

Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction

Sheila Kaye-Smith Biography - (1887–1956), The Tramping Methodist, Sussex Gorse, Joanna Godden, Cold Comfort Farm, Quartet in Heaven

British novelist, born at St Leonard's-on-Sea, Sussex. Following the publication of her first novel, The Tramping Methodist (1908), she left Sussex to live for a time in London where she was to meet Alice Meynell, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Webb. Sussex Gorse (1916) attracted considerable notice, and following the war three further books confirmed her reputation as …

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Judith Kazantzis Biography - (1940– ), Spare Rib, Minefield, The Wicked Queen, Let's Pretend, Flame Tree

British poet, born in Oxford, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as a home tutor with the Inner London Education Authority and was poetry reviewer with Spare Rib magazine for six years during the 1970s. Minefield (1977) was her first collection of poetry; her principal subsequent collections are The Wicked Queen (1980), Let's Pretend (1984), Flame Tree (1988), and The Rabbit Magici…

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Alfred Kazin Biography - (1915–98), On Native Grounds, The New Republic, Fortune, The Inmost Leaf, Contemporaries

American critic, born in Brooklyn of Russian immigrant parentage, educated at City College, New York, and Columbia University. During a wide-ranging academic career he taught at Black Mountain, Harvard, and Amherst, at Cambridge as Fulbright lecturer in 1951, becoming Professor of English at Stony Brook, and latterly Stanford. Kazin began as a freelance teacher, convinced socialist, and student of…

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John B. Keane (John Brendan Keane) Biography - (1928–2002), (John Brendan Keane), Sive, Many Young Men of Twenty, The Field

Irish playwright, born in Listowel, Co. Kerry, educated at St Michael's College, Listowel. He owns a successful public house in the town and has become the most vociferous supporter of the Listowel Writers' Week. Keane's first play, Sive (1959), began his career as a dramatist much admired by the Irish public; with its theme of arranged marriage, Keane manages momentarily to revive the peasant dra…

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Molly Keane Biography - (1904–96), The Knight of the Cheerful Countenance, Taking Chances, Mad Puppetstown, Conversation Piece, Devoted Ladies

Irish novelist, born in Co. Kildare into ?a rather serious Hunting and Fishing and Church-going family? who were not assiduous about seeing that she was properly educated. She chose her pseudonym, ?M. J. Farrell?, to hide her literary side from her sporting friends. Following her first novel, The Knight of the Cheerful Countenance (1921), written for Mills & Boon when she was 17, she wrote ten nov…

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H. R. F. Keating (Henry Raymond Fitzwalter Keating) Biography - (1926– ), (Henry Raymond Fitzwalter Keating), The Times, Zen There Was Murder, A Rush on the Ultimate

British crime writer, born in St Leonards, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He worked as a journalist and during 1967?83 reviewed crime novels for The Times. His first four books are original, occasionally almost surrealist, detective stories (for example, Zen There Was Murder, 1960; A Rush on the Ultimate, 1961), but in 1964 he published The Perfect Murder, the first of a long and successful …

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Barrie Keeffe Biography - (1945– ), Only a Game, A Sight of Glory, Scribes, Gimme Shelter, Abide with Me, Killing Time

British playwright, born in the East End of London, educated at East Ham Grammar School. He was an actor with the National Youth Theatre, and worked as a journalist while he was establishing himself as a dramatist. After Only a Game (1973), about a waning soccer star, he wrote A Sight of Glory (1975), about boxers in the East End, and Scribes (1976), about newspaper workers during a strike. His fi…

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Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Fighty-Four

a novel by George Orwell, published in 1936. The only one of Orwell's novels about a writer, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is most autobiographical in its admission of the fear driving its protagonist, Gordon Comstock, to abandon his poetic vocation for the sake of financial security. Its epigraph is an adaptation of I Corinthians xiii: ?And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greate…

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Weldon Kees Biography - (1914–55), The Last Man, Non-Verbal Communication, The Fall of the Magicians, Poems, 1947–1954

American poet, born in Beatrice, Nebraska, educated at the University of Nebraska. After a period as a research librarian in Denver, he moved to New York in 1943, the year in which The Last Man, his first collection of poetry, appeared, and worked as a journalist and script-writer. During the 1940s he also achieved recognition as an abstract expressionist painter. Following his move to San Francis…

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Garrison Keillor (Garrison Edward Keillor) Biography - (1942– ), (Garrison Edward Keillor), New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Happy to Be Here, Lake Wobegon Days

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Anoka, Minnesota, educated at the University of Minnesota. He worked for radio stations in Minneapolis, becoming host and principal writer for a famous weekly programme ?A Prairie Home Companion?, a throwback to the Golden Age of Radio. It incorporated a variety of country and blues music, and Keillor's stories about the inhabitants of his fictiona…

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Robert Kelly Biography - (1935– ), The Loom, The Common Shore, Red Actions, Lunes, Songs I–XXX, Kali Yuga

American poet, born in Brooklyn, educated at Columbia University. Kelly is a prolific poet who has published over forty books. Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the Black Mountain poets are central influences on his work; these, together with his work on medieval and German language and literature, have helped him to create a processive, visionary poetry of great formal variety. Together wi…

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James Kelman Biography - (1946– ), An Old Pub Near the Angel and Other Stories, Not Not While the Giro

Scottish novelist, born in Govan, Glasgow, one of five sons of a frame-maker and picture restorer. He left school at 15 to serve an apprenticeship as a compositor, but abandoned it two years later when his family emigrated to America. He soon returned to Scotland and subsequently worked in Glasgow, Manchester, and London in a variety of manual jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment. At 28…

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Thomas Keneally (Thomas Michael Keneally) Biography - (1935– ), (Thomas Michael Keneally), The Place at Whitton, The Fear, Bring Larks and Heroes

Australian novelist of Irish Catholic extraction, born in New South Wales. He trained for the Catholic priesthood but was never ordained; a fascination with spiritual and moral failure may owe something to this early training. His first novel, The Place at Whitton (1964), a murder mystery set in a seminary during a retreat, was followed by many others including The Fear (1965), Bring Larks and Her…

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Adrienne Kennedy Biography - (1931– ), Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, A Rat's Mass

African-American dramatist, born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Ohio State University. She began working as a playwright during a visit to West Africa during 1960?1, which gave her a sense of connection with African culture and introduced her to the work of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. In Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962), her first play, Kennedy uses a scenic idiom in which the dream-scape of hall…

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A. L. Kennedy (Alison Louise Kennedy) Biography - (1965– ), (Alison Louise Kennedy), Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Now That You're Back

Scottish novelist and short-story writer, born in Dundee, educated at Warwick University. Her highly acclaimed first collection of stories, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990; John Llewelyn Prize), concerns the ?small lives? of the ?silent majority?. Now That You're Back (1994) contains the caustic story ?Mouseboks Family Dictionary? in which a writer describes her craft as ?Warming my…

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William Joseph Kennedy Biography - (1928– ), The Ink Truck, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed

American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and film critic, born in Albany, New York State. Kennedy's first novel, The Ink Truck (1969), a study of resistance, features a columnist named Bailey, and deals with a prolonged newspaper strike. His next two novels established a reputation for a grittily realist fiction which investigated the lives of those who have lost in some degree in the ra…

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Brendan Kennelly (Timothy Brendan Kennelly) Biography - (1936– ), (Timothy Brendan Kennelly), My Dark Fathers, A Drinking Cup: Poems from the Irish

Irish poet, born in Ballylongford, County Kerry, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Leeds. He became Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College in 1973. His numerous collections of poetry include My Dark Fathers (1964), A Drinking Cup: Poems from the Irish (1970), Salvation, the Stranger (1972), The Islandman (1977), The Boats Are Home (1980), and Breathing Spaces (1…

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Hugh Kenner (William Hugh Kenner) Biography - (1923–2003), (William Hugh Kenner), Paradox in Chesterton, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis

Canadian critic, born in Peterborough, Ontario, educated at the University of Toronto and at Yale. After holding a succession of academic posts he became Franklin Professor and Callaway Professor at the University of Georgia. Paradox in Chesterton (1947), his first critical study, was followed by The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951), which affirmed that poet's importance when his reputation was at its …

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Kenyon Review, The - Southern Review, Kenyon Review

a quarterly journal founded at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, in 1939 by John Crow Ransom, who edited it until 1959. His advisory editors were R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, and Robert Penn Warren. Among the contributors of critical articles during the 1940s and 1950s, when the review was the pre-eminent organ of the New Criticism, were Cleanth Brooks, John Peale Bishop, William Empso…

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W. P. Ker (William Paton Ker) Biography - (1855–1923), (William Paton Ker), The Art of Poetry, Froissart's Chronicles, The Dark Ages

British scholar, born in Glasgow, educated at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1879 he was elected a fellow of All Souls College. Among other academic posts Ker was Chair of English at the newly formed University College of Wales in Cardiff, and Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London (UCL); between 1920 and 1922 he was Oxford Professor of…

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Frank Kermode (John Frank Kermode) Biography - (1919– ), (John Frank Kermode), Romantic Image, The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy

British scholar and critic, born in Douglas, Isle of Man, educated at the University of Liverpool. Among other academic posts, he was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge in 1974. His principal academic field is the English Renaissance, but he is widely known as a reviewer of great range. His Romantic Image (1957) was an influential rethinking of the aesthetic theory and pra…

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Jack Kerouac Biography - (1922–69), The Town and the City, On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax

American novelist, born Jean Louis Lebrid de Kerouac of French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, educated at Columbia University and the New York School for Social Research. Following service in the US Merchant Marine, he worked in various capacities in New York while writing his first novel, The Town and the City (1950). The book's elaborate adaptation of his personal experience and fami…

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Philip Kerr Biography - (1956– ), March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem, A Philosophical Investigation, Dead Meat

British novelist, born in Edinburgh, educated at the University of Birmingham, where he studied Law. His first novel, March Violets (1989), set in Germany during the 1930s, features the detective Bernie Gunther; two further novels in this sequence are The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991). In A Philosophical Investigation (1992), set in a future dystopia, Kerr used the detective gen…

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Ken Kesey Biography - (1935–2001), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion

American novelist, born in La Junta, Colorado, educated at the University of Oregon and Stanford University, where one of his teachers was Malcolm Cowley. In the late 1950s he was introduced to the drug LSD through acting as a paid volunteer for government drug experiments in a California hospital, where he later worked as a ward attendant. These experiences provided the background for his first p…

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Jessie Kesson Biography - (1915–94), The People's Friend, The White Bird Passes, Glitter of Mica

Scottish novelist and playwright, born in Inverness. She never knew her father, and her mother was disowned by her respectable farming family, so that her early upbringing in Elgin was plagued by poverty. At eight years old Kesson was taken away to an orphanage in Skene, Aberdeenshire, and received a good education. At 16 she was sent into service. She married in 1934, living initially in a tent, …

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Sidney Keyes (Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes) Biography - (1922–43), (Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes), Cherwell, Eight Oxford Poets, The Iron Laurel, The Cruel Solstice

British poet, born in Dartford, educated at Queen's College, Oxford. As a student he edited the Cherwell and, with Michael Meyer, Eight Oxford Poets (1941), to which Keith Douglas, John Heath-Stubbs, and Keyes himself were the most notable contributors. The Iron Laurel, his first collection of verse, appeared in 1942, the year in which he enlisted in the army. He was killed after being captured wh…

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John Maynard Keynes Biography - first baron Keynes of Tilton (1883–1946), The Economic Consequences of the Peace

British economist, the single most important and influential economist of the twentieth century: born in Cambridge, son of economist John Neville Keynes, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow. He married Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova (1925) who had come to London with Diaghilev's company. In 1942 he became Baron Keynes of Tilton. In 1919 Keynes resigned from t…

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Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes Biography - (1887–1982), Essays in Biography, Blood Transfusion, A Bibliography of the Works of Dr John Donne

British surgeon, bibliographer, and editor, born in Cambridge, the brother of J. M. Keynes, whose Essays in Biography (1951) he edited; he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He qualified as an MD in 1918 after serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps throughout the First World War; his Blood Transfusion (1922), the first British textbook on the subject, resulted from the pioneering work…

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Mimi Khalvati Biography - (1944– ), In White Ink, Mirrorwork

British poet of Iranian origin, born in Tehran; she moved to Europe at an early age and was educated on the Isle of Wight, at the University of Neuch?tel, Switzerland, and the Drama Centre in London. Khalvati worked in the theatre in Iran before the revolution. The poems in her first collection, In White Ink (1991), are distinguished by their technical sophistication and subtle but vivid imagery; …

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Ismith Khan Biography - (1925– ), The Crucifixion, The Jumbie Bird, The Obeah Man, A Day in the Country

Trinidadian novelist of Pathan ancestry, born in Port of Spain, educated at Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, Michigan State University, the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Johns Hopkins University. His novella The Crucifixion (1988) originated as a thesis submission of Johns Hopkins. Khan's high reputation as a writer rests chiefly on his two novels, The Jumbie Bird (1961) and…

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Benedict Kiely Biography - (1919–2007), The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories, The Small Oxford Book of Dublin

Irish short-story writer, novelist, and critic, born in Dromore, Co. Tyrone. He began studying to be a Jesuit priest but, after a serious illness, he decided to leave the Society. He completed his education at University College, Dublin. Between 1945 and 1964 he worked as a journalist in Dublin, and then taught creative writing at universities in the USA until returning to Ireland in 1968. As a li…

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Thomas Kilroy Biography - (1934– ), The Door, The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, The O'Neill

Irish playwright and novelist, born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, educated at University College, Dublin. From 1962 to 1965 Kilroy taught at various American universities, then returned to Ireland and lectured in English at University College, Dublin. In 1977 he was appointed play editor of the Abbey Theatre, and from 1979 to 1989 he was Professor of English at University College, Galway. He is a fello…

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Kim - Kim, Bildungsroman

a novel by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1901. The story of an Irish orphan's adolescence in late nineteenth-century India, Kim is a rich blend of Bildungsroman, spy fiction, and boy's adventure story which is now recognized as one of the most important fictions dealing with imperialism. Initially brought up in the bazaar by a native foster-mother, Kim takes up with a Lama searching for enlightenm…

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Francis King (Francis Henry King) Biography - (1923– ), (Francis Henry King), To the Dark Tower, An Air that Kills, The Dividing Stream

British novelist, short-story writer, and critic, born in Switzerland, educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. His early years were spent in Switzerland and India and in 1949, after the publication of To the Dark Tower (1946) and An Air that Kills (1948), he began working abroad for the British Council. Subsequent novels include The Dividing Stream (1951), a study of English, Am…

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Stephen King Biography - (1948– ), Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary, The Stand

American writer of horror stories, born in Portland, Maine, which formed the setting of most of his best stories, and educated at the University of Maine. He published short fiction in the 1960s, and became a best-selling author with his first novel, Carrie (1974), which, like many of his books, was filmed. King has perhaps absorbed in his fiction some of the excesses of the horror movies of the t…

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Sidney Kingsley Biography - (1906–95 ), Men in White, The Patriots, Darkness at Noon, Dead End, Ten Million Ghosts

American dramatist, born in Philadelphia, educated at Cornell University. Kingsley had a brief career as an actor before concentrating on writing, directing, and producing plays. His first success was Men in White (1933; Pulitzer Prize), produced at the Group Theatre, which dramatized the conflict faced by a young hospital doctor forced to choose between marriage to a wealthy woman and his medical…

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Maxine Hong Kingston Biography - (1940– ), The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts, China Men

Chinese-American writer, born in Stockton, California, to first-generation immigrant parents from Southern China, educated at the University of California, Berkeley. Her experiences of growing up bilingual and bicultural in a Californian Chinatown are reflected in The Woman Warrior, Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts (1976), and its sequel, China Men (1980). Both works are characterized by struct…

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Galway Kinnell Biography - (1927– ), What a Kingdom It Was, First Poems 1946–1954, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, Body Rags

American poet, born in Providence, Rhode Island, educated at Princeton University and the University of Rochester. Since the early 1950s he has held a succession of visiting posts at universities in Europe, the Middle East, and America; he became director of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 1979. His earlier verse, represented by What a Kingdom It Was (1960) and the belatedly published Fir…

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Thomas Kinsella Biography - (1928– ), The Starlit Eye, Poems, Another September, Night-walker

Irish poet, born in Dublin, where he was educated at University College. After a successful career in the Irish Civil Service, he began teaching at American universities in 1965 and became Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1970. The Starlit Eye (1952) was his first collection of verse. His reputation was established by the highly accomplished work in Poems (1956). The exp…

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Rudyard Kipling Biography - (1865–1936), Stalky and Co, Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three, Life's Handicap

English novelist, poet, and short-story writer, born in Bombay, India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, art teacher and illustrator, and Alice, sister-in-law of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter. As a young child, Kipling was left in England with foster-parents for several years, a traumatic experience of abandonment which was reworked notably in his important short story ?Baa Ba…

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Kipps - Manners and Rules of Good Society, Kipps, Half a Sixpence, The Wealth of Mr Waddy

a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1905. This romantic comedy, drawing on Wells's early experiences as a draper's assistant, established its author as one of the leading Edwardian novelists. Today it survives principally as a period piece. The opening chapters, in which the young, illegitimate Artie Kipps enters Shalford's emporium in Folkestone, contain Well's fullest and bitterest description …

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James Kirkup Biography - (1923– ), A Correct Compassion, Descent into the Cave, The Bewick Bestiary, Scenes from Sesshu

British poet, playwright, and travel writer, born in South Shields, County Durham, educated at Durham University. He has held posts at universities in Britain, Europe, America, and Japan. He has also worked extensively as a translator. Among his earlier collections of poetry is A Correct Compassion (1952), the title poem of which is perhaps his finest single work, developing its rhymed narrative o…

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Carolyn Kizer Biography - (1925– ), Poetry Northwest, The Ungrateful Garden, Knock upon Silence

American poet, born in Spokane, Washington, educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and the University of Washington. In 1959 she founded the magazine Poetry Northwest, which she edited until 1965. Her verse is personal, reflecting love, loss, family life, and the courage of women. Among her earlier volumes are The Ungrateful Garden (1961), Knock upon Silence (1965), and Midnight …

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G. Wilson Knight (George Richard Wilson Knight) Biography - (1897–1985), (George Richard Wilson Knight), The Wheel of Fire, The Imperial Theme, The Shakespearian Tempest

British critic, born in Sutton, Surrey, educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He became Professor of English at the University of Leeds in 1956. The Wheel of Fire (1930) immediately gained him an international reputation. His concern with the underlying metaphorical structures of Shakespeare's plays transcended the constraints of more conventional approaches of the sort typically associated with A. …

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L. C. Knights (Lionel Charles Knights) Biography - (1906–97), (Lionel Charles Knights), Scrutiny, Explorations, Some Shakespearean Themes, An Approach to Hamlet

British critic, born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, educated at Selwyn College and Christ's College, Cambridge. A founder of Scrutiny in 1932, he was its most eminent contributor in the field of Shakespearian studies. He held successive professorships at Sheffield, Bristol, and Cambridge Universities. His essay ?How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?? (1933), collected in Explorations (1946), opened with…

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