Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Clontarf, near Dublin, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. His experiences as a civil servant in Dublin resulted in The Duties of the Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). He was also drama critic for the Dublin Mail, and contributed to other Irish newspapers. In 1878 he left for England, where he became manager of Henry Irving's Royal Ly…
British art critic and poet, born in London, educated at Rugby and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the 1920s he visited Rapallo in Italy, where he came to know Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in shaping his thought and who introduced his work to the Criterion. From his studies of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and architecture in The Quattro Cento (1932) and Stones of Rimini (1934), Stokes …
American novelist, born in Brooklyn; he worked for the New York Daily News while attending New York University. At Stanford he met Ken Kesey, becoming an associate of his during the mid-1960s. Drugs and alcohol are prominent in Stone's novels, sometimes represented by hallucinatory passages, as in A Hall of Mirrors (1967) in which three drifters come to New Orleans and are involved in violence fol…
British dramatist, born in Czechoslovakia, the son of a company doctor who was killed when the Japanese invaded Singapore; he came to England after the war, and took his British stepfather's name. Stoppard left school at 17 to become a journalist, seeing his first play, A Walk on the Water (later, the stage play Enter a Free Man), televised in 1963, and a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, publishe…
English novelist and dramatist, born in Wakefield, the son of a miner, educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. His early novels reflect the working-class background of his Yorkshire upbringing, and his displacement to the intellectual milieu of the South. His experience as a professional rugby player for Leeds formed the background to his first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), in which …
Australian poet and novelist, born in Geraldton, Western Australia, educated at the University of Western Australia. In 1966 he settled in England. Stow's early poetry, Act One (1957), Outrider: Poems 1956?1962 (1962), illustrated by Sydney Nolan, and A Counterfeit Silence (1969), mainly private letters, received wide acclaim as did his spiritually challenging and strongly atmospheric novels A Hau…
British biographer, essayist, and critic, born in London, educated at Leamington College, Liverpool University, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles and established lasting friendships with J. M. Keynes, E. M. Forster, and others with whom he was later identified as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. His first publications were the volumes of poetry Prolusiones Acade…
American poet, born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, educated at Antioch College, Ohio, and Yale Art School. He has taught at Iowa, Yale, Brandeis, and Columbia Universities and became a writer-in-residence at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His poetry collections include Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Reasons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), The Story of Our Lives (1973), The Late …
a play by Eugene O'Neill, produced in 1928. A highly successful play which earned O'Neill a sizeable fortune and a Pulitzer Prize, it was immediately popular for its frank airing of sexual issues presented through a Freudian investigation of its characters' psychology. It tells the story of Nina Leeds and the men in her life, including her possessive father who persuaded her fianc?, Gordon Shaw, n…
British philosopher, born in London, the son of a schoolmaster, educated at St John's College, Oxford. After military service between 1940 and 1946, he began teaching philosophy at University College of North Wales, Bangor; from 1947 onward he lectured at Oxford, becoming Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968. He was knighted in 1977 for his contributions to philosophy, which hav…
the literary technique whereby an author attempts to render the internal verbal, imaginative, and perceptual activities of a character. William James coined the term in Principles of Psychology (1890) to designate the continual succession of cognitive events that take place in the mind. Increasing use of lengthy passages of introspection in the novels of Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others …
a play by Tennessee Williams, produced and published in 1948. Blanche DuBois, her life in ruins and her family home, Belle Reve, compulsorily sold and the proceeds frittered away, arrives in the Elysian Fields district of New Orleans, a virtual slum, to stay with her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. Blanche finds the coarseness of Stanley and his pals, most of them ?Polacks? (of …
a movement of thought which developed from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857?1913) and the practice of the Russian Formalists (see formalism). It was chiefly a French phenomenon, although it had far-reaching effects elsewhere, and rose to international prominence with the anthropological work of Claude L?vi-Strauss (1908??): Structural Anthropology (1958), The Savage Mind (1962)…
Irish novelist, born in Queensland, Australia, brought up in Ireland, and educated in England. He married Iseult Gonne (Maud Gonne's daughter) in 1920, and his early poetry, which appeared in We Have Kept the Faith (1923), was praised by W. B. Yeats. Stuart was a man of action, keen on sports, and his early novels The Coloured Dome (1932), Pigeon Irish (1932), and Try the Sky (1933) reflect an int…
American novelist, born in Newport News, Virginia, educated at Duke University. He has served in the US Marine Corps. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), the story of a young Southern woman's madness and eventual suicide, is indebted to Faulkner. The relatively brief The Long March (1956), set against the backdrop of the Korean War in which he served, is considered by some critics to be …
American novelist and critic, born in Brooklyn, New York City, educated at Brandeis University. Ever since his involvement with the Fiction Collective, which he helped to establish in 1970, Sukenick has come to be regarded as one of the central figures in contemporary American post-modernist fiction. Like Raymond Federman, Sukenick is as much interested in the iconic or visual character of fiction…
an autobiographical poem in blank verse by John Betjeman, first published in 1960; The Illustrated Summoned by Bells, with paintings and drawings by the author's friend Sir Hugh Casson, appeared in 1990. The text is in nine parts occupying more than 100 pages, and its sales exceed those of any poem of comparable length in the twentieth century. Betjeman used blank verse for the work, his most exte…
a novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926; published in Britain as Fiesta in 1927. The original title derives from a passage in Ecclesiastes, which concludes that ?the earth abideth forever?. Its epigraph, ?you are all a lost generation? (see Lost Generation), comes from a story told to the author by Gertrude Stein, but was later described by Hemingway as laughable after a disagreement with S…
a novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1973. A young Canadian divorcee travels with three friends?one of them her lover?to her childhood home, in search of clues to the disappearance of her father from a remote island in a large lake in Northern Quebec. This outward search takes her back to her childhood and her past, inducing her to face the unresolved questions of her life as a woman. Motherho…
was a European movement in the arts, centred on the proclamations and activities of Andr? Breton (1896?1966) in Paris. It included work in film, painting, and literature, although it was opposed to the very notion of art as irredeemably bourgeois. The Surrealists sought immediate, uncensored contact with the unconscious and the unintelligible, and the principle of automatic writing was at the hear…
American poet, born in Logan, Utah, educated at Utah State University. Swenson's first volume of poetry, Another Animal, was published in 1954 but it was several decades later that she secured her standing as one of the most significant of post-war American women poets. Despite the semantic simplicity of her verse her poems are often abstruse and elliptical. Like many of her contemporaries she saw…
British novelist, born in London, educated at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, The Sweetshop Owner (1980), was followed by the psychological thriller Shuttlecock (1981; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1983), which traces the narrator's gradual discovery of the truth about his father's wartime past; and by a collection of short stories, many of them with a London setting, Learning to …
a trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1965; originally published as Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Men at Arms concerns the attempts of its hero, Guy Crouchback, to get a commission at the outbreak of the Second World War, partly to distract himself from the memory of his ex-wife, Virginia Troy, whom he still loves. He enlists in …
is present wherever an object or gesture stands for or suggests something beyond itself, and in this sense is littered about ordinary life, something we engage in all the time. In literature it refers to the technique of relying heavily on master images, as in the drama of Ibsen or Maeterlinck, and more importantly, to a movement in poetry and aesthetics in France at the end of the nineteenth cent…
British biographer and bibliophile, born in London; he left school at the age of 14. His involvements in book-dealing led him to establish the First Editions Club in 1922, which he ran until his death. An authority on the literature and bibliography of the 1890s, he produced his widely read Anthology of ?Nineties? Verse in 1928. Through his bibliographical activities he developed a compelling inte…
British poet, biographer, social historian, crime novelist, and critic, born in London, the brother of A. J. A. Symons; he worked as an advertising copywriter before the Second World War, but in 1945 became a freelance writer and critic. He founded and edited Twentieth Century Verse (1937?9), an important magazine which published most of the young poets outside the immediate Auden circle. He publi…
Irish play-wright, born in a Dublin suburb, the son of a barrister. After graduating in languages, including Celtic, from Trinity College, Dublin, he travelled in Europe and settled for some years in Paris. There, W. B. Yeats advised the aspiring writer to go to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, in search of ?a life that has never found expression?. Accordingly, he stayed there annu…
British poet, born in Budapest, Hungary; his family came to London after the uprising of 1956. He studied fine art at Leeds College of Art, where Martin Bell encouraged him in his early work as a poet. After working as an art teacher in various schools and colleges, he became a freelance writer in 1987. In addition to his considerable reputation as a poet, he is highly regarded as a graphic artist…