magic realism - lo real maravilloso, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, The Passion of New Eve

a term coined in 1928 by the art critic Franz Roh to describe a school of German painting, has been most frequently used in the discussion of modern Latin American fiction. Writers who have been gathered under the label include the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias (1899?1974), the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904?80), the Colombian Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez (1928??), and the Chileans Jos? Donoso (1924??)…

1 minute read

Magus, The

Jayanta Mahapatra Biography - (1928– ), Close the Sky, Ten by Ten, A Rain of Rites, Life Signs

Derek Mahon Biography - (1941– ), Listener's, Vogue, New Statesman, Twelve Poems, Night Crossing, Lives, The Snow Party

Northern Irish poet, born in Belfast; he grew up in Glengormley, Co. Antrim, and was educated at Belfast Institute and Trinity College, Dublin. After teaching in Belfast and Dublin, he became the Listener's drama critic in 1971 and subsequently held editorial positions with Vogue and the New Statesman. He has also worked as a writer-in-residence in Britain and America and as a television scriptwri…

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Norman Mailer Biography - (1923– ), The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, Advertisements for Myself

American novelist, essayist, and journalist, born in Long Branch, New Jersey, he grew up in Brooklyn and was educated at Harvard. Mailer served with the armed forces in the Pacific during the Second World War, which provided the background for his highly successful first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948). His following novels, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), were poorly received.…

3 minute read

Main Street

a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920, dramatized in 1921. Carol Milford, an unremarkable though quick-witted girl, upon graduation from college marries Will Kennicott, a kindly and hardworking doctor from Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Carol yearns for a free and gracious life, but when she attempts to put her vague aspirations into action by improving village life, finds herself thwarted by t…

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Roger Mais Biography - (1905–55), Public Opinion, The Hills Were Joyful Together, Brother Man, Black Lightning

Jamaican novelist, poet, painter, and playwright, born in Kingston, Jamaica. Although he belonged to the well-to-do middle class, Mais had a lively social conscience that inspired lifelong interest in the poorer classes of his black countrymen. Sharp social criticism in an article he wrote for the People's National Party newspaper Public Opinion in 1944 earned him a six-month jail sentence, where …

1 minute read

Sara Maitland Biography - (1950– ), Daughter of Jerusalem, Virgin Territory, A Map of the New Country, Three Times Table

British novelist and short-story writer, born in London, educated at Oxford University, where she became interested in reconciling feminist principles with Christianity. Her first novel, Daughter of Jerusalem (1978; Somerset Maugham Prize, 1979), was a feminist reworking of Old and New Testament stories and concerned women and fertility. Feminist themes were similarly explored in her novel Virgin …

1 minute read

Adewale Maja-Pearce Biography - (1953– ), Index on Censorship. Loyalties and Other Stories, In My Father's Country

British-Nigerian writer, born in London of British and Yoruba parents; he grew up in Lagos and was educated at the University College of Wales, Swansea, and London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. He became a researcher for Index on Censorship. Loyalties and Other Stories (1986) are short stories drawing on his experiences of Nigeria. He has subsequently made the documentary es…

less than 1 minute read

Clarence Major Biography - (1936– ), All-Night Visitors, Reflex and Bone Structure, Emergency Exit, Such Was The Season

American novelist and poet, educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, the State University of New York, and the Union for Experimental Colleges and Universities; amongst other teaching posts he became Professor at the University of California at Davis. Widely recognized to be at the experimental forefront of African-American poetry and fiction, he has made a spe…

1 minute read

Major Barbara

a play by Bernard Shaw, performed in 1905, published in 1907. This portrays a wager and a moral conflict between Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her father Andrew Undershaft, a wealthy and powerful manufacturer of armaments. Each undertakes to give up his or her calling if the other's work proves sufficiently impressive. On a visit to the East End shelter where she works, he undermines…

1 minute read

Bernard Malamud Biography - (1914–86), The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition

American novelist, born in Brooklyn to first-generation Russian immigrant parents, educated at Columbia University. The recipient of many writing awards and honours, as a popular Jewish-American writer he has contributed influentially to the ethnic consciousness of American literature. His first novel, The Natural (1952), adapted as a film in 1984, parodies both the pretensions of those who see ba…

1 minute read

Malgudi Days

David Malouf Biography - (1934– ), Bicycle and Other Poems, Neighbours in a Thicket, First Things Last, Selected Poems

Australian poet and fiction writer, born in Brisbane. Malouf first established his reputation with Bicycle and Other Poems (1970), while Neighbours in a Thicket (1974) revealed an early interest in European history. The poems in First Things Last (1980) explored the contours of landscapes of the mind; Selected Poems appeared in 1980 and New and Collected Poems in 1991. The shift from the apparentl…

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Albert Maltz Biography - (1908–85), Merry-Go-Round, Peace on Earth, Black Pit, Private Hicks

American dramatist and novelist, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at Columbia University and Yale Drama School. At Yale Maltz attended George Pierce Baker's influential drama workshop where he befriended George Sklar; the friendship resulted in Sklar's collaboration with the writing of Maltz's influential early plays, Merry-Go-Round (1932) and Peace on Earth (1933). Maltz was quickly adopted b…

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David Mamet Biography - (1947– ), Duck Variations, The Poet and the Rent, Squirrels, Reunion, American Buffalo

American dramatist, born in Flossmore, Illinois, educated at Goddard College, Vermont. Mamet moved to Chicago and helped found the St Nicholas Theatre Company which subsequently staged the first productions of many of his early plays including Duck Variations (1972), The Poet and the Rent (1974), Squirrels (1974), and Reunion (1976). From the mid-1970s Mamet developed a close relationship with the…

2 minute read

Man and Superman - Don Juan in Hell

a play by Bernard Shaw, first published in 1903, first performed (without Act 3) in 1905; Act 3, Don Juan in Hell, was first presented, as a one-act play, in 1907. This is a witty variation on the Don Juan story, in which the brilliant John Tanner, a progressive thinker with distinct similarities to Shaw himself, is relentlessly if slyly pursued by a woman determined to make him her husband, Ann W…

1 minute read

Eli Mandel (as Wolf) Biography - (1922–1992), Trio, Fuseli Poems, An Idiot Joy, Stony Plain, Out of Place, Life Sentence

Canadian poet and critic, born in Esteven, Saskatchewan, educated at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto. Mandel began publishing verse in small magazines in the early 1950s; his first notable collection, ?Minotaur Poems?, appeared along with poems by Phyllis Webb and Gael Turnbull in Trio (1954). His first individual volume was Fuseli Poems (1960), where the title pays homage to the eigh…

1 minute read

Mandelbaum Gate, The

a novel by M. Spark, published in 1965. Set in Jerusalem in the early 1960s, the novel opens with the reflections of a middle-aged British expatriate, Freddie Hamilton, a bachelor and amateur poet, concerning the arrival of a British schoolmistress, Barbara Vaughan, who has enlisted his help in order to visit certain religious sites on the Jordanian side of the Mandelbaum Gate, which marks the div…

1 minute read

Jane Mander Biography - (1877–1949), The Story of a New Zealand River, The Passionate Puritan, The Strange Attraction, Allen Adair

New Zealand novelist, born near Auckland. A family timber-milling background is reflected in her powerful and sensitive depiction of the wild North Island landscape as spiritually as well as physically challenging, as in The Story of a New Zealand River (1920). Both The Passionate Puritan (1922) and The Strange Attraction (1922) evoked sexual as well as colonial tensions; in this respect Mander wa…

1 minute read

Man for All Seasons, A

Manhattan Transfer - Manhattan Transfer, U.S.A

a novel by John Dos Passos, published in 1925. Manhattan Transfer was the most experimental of Dos Passos's early novels and in it he employed narrative techniques which he was to develop in the subsequent novels that make up the U.S.A. (1938) trilogy. As its title?a reference to the ?transfer? stations on the New York subway system?indicates, the novel is concerned with life in New York City in t…

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Bill Manhire Biography - (1946– ), Freed, The Elaboration, How To Take Off Your Clothes At a Picnic, Good Looks

New Zealand poet and short-story writer, born in Invercargill, educated at the University of Otago and at University College, London. His early work appeared in the seminal magazine Freed, along with that of Ian Wedde and Murray Edmond. As Reader in the Department of English at Victoria University, Wellington, Manhire inaugurated a creative writing course which has had a strong influence on the wo…

1 minute read

Olivia Manning Biography - (1908–80), The Wind Changes, The Doves of Venus, The Balkan Trilogy, The Great Fortune

British novelist, born in Portsmouth. She spent much of her youth in Ireland, where her first novel, The Wind Changes (1937), is set; the book explores the relationships between a young woman, her Irish Republican lover, and the middleaged English writer who fascinates them both, and displays the interest in political themes she was later to develop in her most famous work. She studied art in Port…

1 minute read

Man of the People, A - arriviste

a novel by Chinua Achebe, published in 1966. This satire deals with corruption and the cult of personality in a newly independent African state. The two main protagonists are government minister Chief Nanga, ?the most approachable politician in the country?, and his idealistic former pupil Odili, who narrates the story in a style characteristic of the author, effectively blending African proverbs …

1 minute read

Katherine Mansfield, pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Biography - (1888–1923), pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, New Age, In a German Pension, Rhythm, Prelude, Bliss

British short-story writer, born in Wellington, New Zealand, educated at Queen's College, London between 1903 and 1906. Returning to New Zealand in 1906 she rapidly tired of staid colonial society and returned to London. She became involved in a series of unsatisfactory affairs and a short-lived marriage in 1909 to George Bowden. The despondency caused by a pregnancy by another man, which had resu…

3 minute read

Hilary Mantel Biography - (1952– ), The Spectator, Every Day Is Mother's Day, Vacant Possession

British novelist, born in Derbyshire, educated at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She worked in Africa and the Middle East for eight years, and in 1987 became film critic for The Spectator. Her novels are noted for their acerbic wit, their exposure of hypocrisy, and their fascination with the grotesque and with madness and obsession. Every Day Is Mother's Day (1985), a bla…

1 minute read

Man Who Was Thursday, The

Man with the Blue Guitar, The

a collection of poetry by Wallace Stevens, first published in 1937. The title sequence of thirty-three short poems in couplets is among the best-known of his works. The book also contained two shorter pieces, the satirical ?A Thought Revolved? and the elegiac ?The Men that Are Falling?, and an abridged version of ?Owl's Clover?, which had originally appeared in 1936; this lengthy sequence, widely …

1 minute read

Jack Mapanje Biography - (1945?– ), Of Chameleons and Gods, The Chattering of Wagtails in Mikuyu Prison

dissident Malawian poet, born of Yao and Nyanja parents in Kadango village in the south of the country. He received his university education in Malawi and in London, and went on to become the best-known of the disproportionate number of outstanding poets to have been produced by this small landlocked African country. Mapanje's first collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods (1981), shows his kee…

1 minute read

Mapp and Lucia

Frank Marcus Biography - (1928– ), The Killing of Sister George, The Formation Dancers, Mrs Mouse, Are You Within?

British dramatist and critic, born in Breslau, Germany, educated at Bunce Court School, Kent, and St Martin's School of Art; he was an actor, director, and antiques dealer before becoming a professional writer. His most successful play remains The Killing of Sister George (1965), a warm and humorous study of a lesbian love affair between a young woman and the fading star of a radio soap opera. His…

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Dambudzo Marechera Biography - (1955–87), The House of Hunger, Black Sunlight, Mind Blast, The Black Insider

African novelist and short-story writer, born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), educated in a mission boarding school, and at Oxford University. Subsequently, he lived on the edge of insolvency in London, Cardiff, and Oxford, before returning to a newly independent Zimbabwe. The House of Hunger (1979), a collection of short stories, portrays the brutalities of life in a pre-independence Zimbabwean towns…

1 minute read

Kamala Markandaya Biography - (1923–2004), Nectar in a Sieve, Some Inner Fury, Possession, The Coffer Dams, Pleasure City

British novelist, born and educated in India. Her first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954), was variously described as a rural tragedy, a portrait of the clash between tradition and change in modern India, and a convincing depiction of a deprived woman's life. As both anglophone and expatriate, Markandaya was criticized for her bourgeois rendition of a peasant woman's sensibility and her inaccurate r…

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E. A. Markham (Edward Archibald Markham) Biography - (1939– ), (Edward Archibald Markham), Ambit, Artrage, Cross-Fire, Master Class, Family Matters

British poet, born in Monserrat, West Indies; he emigrated to Britain in 1956 and was educated at Kilburn Polytechnic, London, and Saint David's University College, Lampeter. Since 1968 he has held numerous positions as a lecturer, writer-in-residence, and arts administrator in Britain, the West Indies, and Papua New Guinea. In 1980 he became assistant editor of Ambit and edited Artrage magazine f…

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Edwin Markham (Edwin Charles Edward Anson Markham) Biography - (1852–1940), (Edwin Charles Edward Anson Markham), Commonweal, San Francisco Examiner

American poet, born in Oregon City; he grew up in Southern California, and was largely self-educated before his enrolment at the Christian College in Santa Rosa. He became Principal of the Tompkins Observatory School in Oakland in 1890. The socialist character of his early verse, which appeared in William Morris's Commonweal and other journals from around 1886 onward, culminated in ?The Man with t…

1 minute read

Daphne Marlatt Biography - (1942– ), Touch to My Tongue, Steveston, Zocalo, How Hug a Stone, Frames, Leaf/leafs, Rings

Canadian poet, born in Melbourne, Australia; she moved with her family to Vancouver in 1951, later attending the Universities of British Columbia and Indiana. Marlatt's poetry is influenced by French feminist linguistic theory and the work of some of her Quebec women contemporaries; her concern with showing how personality and gender identity are constructed by language is particularly evident in …

1 minute read

J. J. Marric Biography

Sir Edward Marsh (Sir Edward Howard Marsh) Biography - (1872–1953), (Sir Edward Howard Marsh), Georgian Poetry, Letters from America, Collected Poems

British editor, patron of the arts, and translator, born in London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Having entered the Civil Service in 1896, he became private secretary to Winston S. Churchill in 1905. In association with his close friend Rupert Brooke, he launched the Georgian Poetry series in 1912; Marsh edited each of the five volumes, though to most of their large readership he was kn…

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Dame Ngaio Marsh (Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh) (pron. Ny-o) Biography - (1899–1982), (Dame Edith Ngaio Marsh), A Play Toward, Play Production, A Man Lay Dead

New Zealand detective novelist, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she studied art and worked in the theatre as an actress and producer. In the 1940s she produced many plays at Canterbury University in Christchurch, was made an honorary lecturer in drama, and published two books on the subject: A Play Toward (1946) and Play Production (1948). In 1962 a new theatre at the university was given…

1 minute read

Paule Marshall Biography - (1929– ), Brown Girl, Brownstones, South Clap Hands and Sing

American writer, born in New York to Barbadian immigrant parents, educated at Brooklyn College. Her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), was followed by South Clap Hands and Sing (1961), a collection of novellas. These early works display the commitment and maturity that characterize all her writings, as she examines from various perspectives the central issues of race, class, and gender. …

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Adam Mars-Jones Biography - (1954– ), The Independent, Lantern Lecture, A Darker Proof, The Waters of Thirst

British writer and critic, born in London, educated at Westminster and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He became film critic and reviewer for The Independent. His first collection of short stories, Lantern Lecture (1981; Somerset Maugham Award, 1982), was widely praised for its stylistic elegance and surreal wit. A Darker Proof (1986; with Edmund White) is a collection of stories dealing with the AIDS cr…

less than 1 minute read

Una Marson (Una Maud Marson) Biography - (1905–65), (Una Maud Marson), Tropic Reveries, Heights and Depths, The Moth and the Star

Martian Poetry - A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, locus classicus, Arcadia, Pea Soup, Looking into the Deep End

James Fenton's term for a mode of composition characterized by the use of startlingly unusual metaphors and similes produced by imaginative transpositions of visual data. The heyday of Martian poetry began in 1979, when Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home appeared, the title poem of which is the locus classicus of the idiom; its opening lines provide an example of the procedures by which…

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