Nigerian dramatist, poet, and novelist, born in Abeokuta, educated at the universities of Ibadan and Leeds. His first play, The Swamp-Dwellers (1958), was followed by the most successful of his early plays, The Lion and Jewel (1959), a sardonic comedy dramatizing the clash between Lakunle, a young, priggish schoolteacher of Westernized disposition, and Baroka, an ageing but physically agile and po…
a science fiction term applied to novels and tales usually set in interstellar space. The classic space opera has its roots in the nineteenth-century dime novel and in other popular forms of romance which emphasized extravagant action, an imperial condescension to ?lesser? races, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Although space operas were written in Europe at the turn of the century, fr…
British author, born in Edinburgh; her father was Jewish and born in Scotland, her mother was English and Anglican. Spark was educated at James Gillespie's School for Girls in Edinburgh, on which her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was based, and which she claimed was ?more progressive than I realised? (Scotland on Sunday, 16 Sept. 1990). In 1937 she married Sydney Oswald Spark and they moved …
a weekly review of politics, current affairs, and the arts begun in 1828 by Robert Stephen Rintoul, whose choice of title invoked the illustrious example of the early eighteenth-century periodical. Following Rintoul's retirement in 1858, a succession of editors maintained the moderate radicalism of the journal, regarded by William Gladstone as ?one of the few papers which are written in the fear a…
American short-story writer and novelist, born in Carrollton, Mississippi, educated at Vanderbilt University. Her early novels, Fire in the Morning (1948) and This Crooked Way (1952), explored Southern themes from perspectives ignored by her contemporaries; The Voice at the Back Door (1956), detailing an unscrupulous lawyer's conflict with a rough but highly principled athlete, was an honest exami…
Australian feminist critic and literary theorist, born in Newcastle, New South Wales, educated at the universities of Sydney, New England, and London. Spender's importance was established with Man Made Language (1980), in which she argued that male cultural dominance extended to a patriarchal bias inherent in spoken and written communication. Among her subsequent works are Invisible Women: The Sch…
British poet and critic, born in London, educated at University College, Oxford. As a student he began his lasting friendship with W. H. Auden, whose poems were first collected in an edition of thirty copies hand-printed by Spender in 1928. While at Oxford he also produced a pamphlet of his own poems entitled Nine Experiments (1928), which was followed in 1930 by Twenty Poems. After graduating in …
American poet, born in Los Angeles, educated at the University of California, Berkeley. Spicer lived most of his life in California, combining poetry with the professional study of linguistics. Spicer and Robert Duncan were equally energetic in their responses to the writings of others; despite their shared interest in the occult, however, there were many differences between them, particularly reg…
Indian writer, critic, literary theorist, and academic, born in Calcutta, where she was educated. She later studied in America, where she has held several important academic posts. In 1976 she translated Derrida's Of Grammatology, which was instrumental in disseminating the theories of deconstruction in America and in Britain. In her own critical practice, Spivak expands the methodology of deconst…
British poet and editor, born in Plymouth, educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He began his career as a literary journalist with the New Age, being, like its editor A. R. Orage, a convinced Fabian socialist. In 1917 he became editor of the New Statesman and founded the London Mercury in 1919. In the course of the 1920s he emerged as a man of considerable literary influence. He was unofficial…
Italian economist, born in Turin, educated at the University of Turin. Sraffa fled the persecution of Mussolini's Italy to come to Britain (with the help of Keynes) in the late 1920s. He became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sraffa's decisive influence on Wittgenstein's later philosophical investigations is legendary; he also became a close friend of Antonio Gramsci (a friendship that sus…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Covina, California, but grew up in Colorado; she was educated at the University of Colorado and the University of Heidelberg. In 1940 she married the poet Robert Lowell, the first of her three husbands; their marriage and divorce are the source of some of her most incisive short fiction. Her first novel, Boston Adventure (1944), is a long, confessi…
American poet, born in Hutchinson, Kansas, educated at the universities of Kansas and Iowa. Stafford was one of the most prolific of twentieth-century American poets, though much of his work appeared in little magazines or been published by small presses, and he did not enjoyed the fame of some of his contemporaries. He is frequently associated with the American tradition of transcendentalism exem…
a South African cultural magazine (taking its name from the young men who ride ?staff? on the crowded commuter trains from Johannesburg's black townships, by climbing on the carriage roofs or standing on the steps), which first appeared in March 1978, produced by the radical book publishing house Ravan Press. The magazine's first editorial stated its aim as being ?not to impose ?standards? but to …
British poet, biographer, editor, and critic, born in London, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize in 1958. He was John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University, New York, until 1977, when he became a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. The Astronomy of Love (1961), his first collection of poetry, displays the highly developed technical accomplis…
a magazine of poetry, criticism, and prose fiction begun in mimeographed form by Jon Silkin in 1952. Silkin's early editorials established Stand's abiding concern with the social functions of literature, a topic which has been vigorously discussed within its page by contributors with differing views; in 1979 the magazine entered into a debate with PN Review over the political implications of vario…
British sciencefiction writer and philosopher, born in Cheshire, educated at Oxford and at Liverpool University, where he taught after the First World War. He was the most formidable figure in the field of British science fiction after H. G. Wells; though his audience was not wide, the extraordinary conceptual sweep of his fictional discourses upon future history had a powerful impact upon other w…
British travel writer, born in Paris; she was domiciled for most of her life in Italy. After attending the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, she went to Baghdad in 1930, publishing Baghdad Sketches, her first book, in 1933. She subsequently travelled widely in the Middle East, describing her hazardous expeditions to remote areas in The Valley of the Assassins (1934) and The Southern …
British novelist, the daughter of an English mother and Guyanese father, born and brought up in London. She settled for seven years in the Venezuelan Andes where she managed her husband's sugar plantation and avocado farm, the subject of her first acclaimed novel, The Keepers of the House (1982). In The Slow Train to Milan (1983) she draws on her travels through Italy with a group of Venezuelan ex…
New Zealand critic, editor, poet, and novelist, born in Auckland, educated at Auckland University College and Bristol University. He first made an impact with The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (1964), a text on modernist poetics which has been widely used in British and American universities. He has also produced volumes of verse including Queseda (1978), Walking Westwards (1978), Geographies (1982),…
Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in Rockdale, New South Wales, educated at Sydney Teachers' College. In 1928 she left Australia. She and William J. Blake, the American writer and Marxist economist, whom she later married, travelled a great deal, living in the USA, Britain, and Europe. Her first publication, The Salzburg Tales (1934), written while working in a Paris bank, and struc…
American novelist, historian, and biographer, born in Lake Mills, Iowa, educated at the University of Utah and the State University of Iowa. After teaching at Harvard, he held a professorship at Stanford University, California, from 1945 to 1976. His early novels, which establish the concern with identity, individuality, and community that runs throughout his work, include Remembering Laughter (19…
American novelist, poet, playwright, and critic, born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, educated at Radcliffe College and Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore. As a child, Stein lived in Vienna, Paris, and Oakland in California before taking an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Harvard where she studied under William James, who was later to remark that she was among the brightest students he had …
American novelist, born in Salinas, California, educated at Stanford University. He held various odd jobs before publishing his first work, A Cup of Gold (1929), a pirate romance about the buccaneer Henry Morgan. Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionate portrait of the Mexican-American ?paisanos?, set in Monterey, established him as a master of the realistic novel of contemporary life. In similar vei…
American critic, born in Paris of Austrian-Jewish parents; from 1940, when his family fled France, he grew up in America. He was educated at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1961 he became a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was appointed Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974. Much of Steiner's writing is de…
Irish poetand story-writer, born in Dublin. He came from a poor family and began writing while working as a clerk in a solicitor's office. The poems and articles he contributed in Sinn Fein brought him to the notice of George Russell (?AE?) with whose encouragement Stephens published Insurrections (1909), one of several volumes of poems culminating in Collected Poems (1926; revised 1954). His firs…
American poet, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and at New York University Law School. After working as a lawyer in New York, in 1916 he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he was Vice-President from 1934 until his death. Harmonium (1923), his remarkably assured first collection of poetry, drew little acclaim from the critics of the day; Stevens retained …
American poet, born in Cambridge, England, of American parents; she grew up in the USA and was educated at the University of Michigan. After working as a school-teacher in England and the USA, she settled in Britain in the early 1960s. She has held posts as writer-in-residence at various colleges and universities throughout Britain. Living in America (1965) and Reversals (1969), her first two coll…
New Zealand poet, born in Taranaki Province, New Zealand; he settled in Australia in 1938. As the influential editor of the Red Page of the Bulletin and a publisher's editor he did much to encourage younger poets. His early volumes of verse, Green Lions (1936) and The White Cry (1939), were lyrics celebrating the beauty of New Zealand landscapes. Elegy for an Airman (1940) and Sonnets to the Unkno…
British academic, critic, and novelist, born in Edinburgh, educated at Edinburgh Academy and Oriel College, Oxford. Among several academic posts, he was Tutor and Reader in English Literature at Oxford during 1949?73. He has written a critical biography of Hardy (1971), and studies of Shakespeare (1949), Joyce (1957), Peacock (1963), Kipling (1966), and Conrad (1968), while his Eight Modern Writer…
a play by G. B. Shaw, first performed in 1923 and published in 1924. Written in an idiomatic and at times light-hearted style, with the characters saying (in Shaw's words) ?the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing?, this traces Joan of Arc's story from Vaucouleurs to Rouen. She charms and chivvies the local squire, Baudricourt, into sending her to Chin…