This study of Saul Bellow, initially published in 1982, looks at this Nobel Prize-winning author as a leading figure in the development of contemporary fiction, one whose work has, however, been challenged by more experimental, 'post-modern' developments in the novel.

Bradbury draws attention to Bellow's comedy, his sense of contemporary history and its stresses and anxieties, his attempt to sustain an adequate concept of the individual and the power of the imagination in an age of overwhelming concepts and notions of 'death of the subject'. Above all, emphasis is placed on Bellow's contemporaneity and significance, his role in the contemporary possibilities of the novel.

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.

'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others' When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. 'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable has since become a world-famous classic. This Penguin Modern classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury.

This study of Saul Bellow, initially published in 1982, looks at this Nobel Prize-winning author as a leading figure in the development of contemporary fiction, one whose work has, however, been challenged by more experimental, 'post-modern' developments in the novel. Bradbury draws attention to Bellow's comedy, his sense of contemporary history and its stresses and anxieties, his attempt to sustain an adequate concept of the individual and the power of the imagination in an age of overwhelming concepts and notions of 'death of the subject'. Above all, emphasis is placed on Bellow's contemporaneity and significance, his role in the contemporary possibilities of the novel.

With an introduction by James Naughtie Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system . . . But haven't we tried all that? Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard's desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard's wife Barbara, promiscuous '70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood. The History Man is Malcolm Bradbury's masterpiece, the definitive campus novel and one of the most influential novels of the 1970s. Funny, disconcerting and provocative, Bradbury brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his away around campus. But beneath the surface is an altogether more affecting portrait: it reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.

Is Moses Herzog – philosopher, suffering romantic and cuckhold – losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend and he is left alone with his whirling thoughts, yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and those of the modern age. His head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of his troubled heart.

This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion. The enduring delight of this tale of romantic intrigue is rooted in Forster's colorful characters, including outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Written in 1908, A Room With A View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.

Catch-22 is like no other novel we have ever read. It has its own style, its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. National ads/media.

In Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain returns to the idyllic river community of his childhood. The flashes of farce and general comic exuberance which enlivened Huckleberry Finn are sustained in this later work; but the mood is altogether more restless and critical. Twain uses certain stock characters and devices, such as the sardonic cracker-barrel philosopher, the scoundrel unmasked, and the substitution of babies, to build up a complex, ironical and morally disturbing account of human nature under slavery. As Malcolm Bradbury shows, some of the novel's ambiguities result from the peculiar circumstances in which it was written; originally a slight comedy of identity based on Siamese twins, it developed into something much more ambitious, and finally Twain discarded most of the original plot: 'I pulled one of the stories out by the roots - a kind of literary Caesarean operation.' Those Extraordinary Twins, the short story from which the novel grew, is also printed in this volume.

'The Modern movement in the arts transformed consciousness and artistic form just as the energies of modernity--scientific, technological, philosophical, political--transformed for ever the nature, the speed, the sensation of human life, ' write the editors in their new Preface. This now classic survey explores the ideas, the groupings and the social tensions that shaped this transformation.

Looking to strike it rich with television gold, an English media tycoon enlists the help of an unassuming novelist to script his small-screen epic, to disastrous--and hilarious--effect The year is 1986, and the cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher's government have trickled down to university life, where departments are being forced to shave their payrolls to account for reduced public funding. Meanwhile, at Eldorado Television, a different kind of cut is about to wreak havoc. Lord Mellow, head of the declining studio, watches as his last-ditch effort to produce a hit series falls to pieces. The show's star, the volatile but vaunted Sir Luke Trimingham, has just declared that he will quit unless the script is entirely rewritten. Desperate to save the project, Eldorado brings university lecturer and author Henry Babbacombe into the fold to write thirteen new episodes of ambitious television--something so grand that the leading man cannot possibly refuse it. But the production is plagued from the start, suffering endless calamities with its unpredictable actors and crew, whose behind-the-scenes drama rivals anything Babbacombe could dream up.

A headstrong young journalist goes on the adventure of a lifetime, traveling through Europe to find the world's most enigmatic philosopher Bazlo Criminale is one of Europe's most legendary living men. A mysterious novelist and thinker known for his extreme elusiveness, the beloved Criminale is a cultural icon of the highest order. Seeking to find the man behind the myth, a London television-news station hires Francis Jay, an enterprising young reporter, to find Criminale. From Vienna to Budapest to the picturesque lakeshores of Italy, Jay journeys across the continent--and even briefly to Brazil--interviewing the man's biographer, his publisher, and his former lover, all of whom have their own interests at stake. Through literary award dinners and other examples of "culture as spectacle," Jay must navigate the chaotic world of post-Cold War Europe as he chases the specter of a literary legend.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In this comedic novel, an English professor collides with disaster at the peak of the Cold War Shortly after his plane first grazes the tarmac in the eastern European nation of Slaka, Dr. Angus Petworth is beset by a cavalcade of misadventures. A university lecturer and seasoned international traveler, Petworth is nevertheless unprepared for the oddities of culture and circumstance that await him on the other side of the iron curtain. In two eventful weeks, Petworth gives an incendiary interview, is seduced by a femme fatale, and becomes embroiled in a plot of international intrigue, all of which conspire to give the mild, unassuming professor way more than he bargained for. Satirizing everything from critics and diplomats to Marxism and academia, Malcolm Bradbury's Rates of Exchange is a witty and lighthearted novel of cultural interchange at the height of the Cold War.

Malcolm Bradbury's humorous look at Britain's transition to midcentury modernity After spending a year teaching in an American university in the 1950s, Malcolm Bradbury returned to England only to realize that his native country had become nearly as mystifying to him as the American Midwest. As Britain marched toward a new decade, much of the country was changing inexorably, its agrarian past paved over by suburban developers, its quiet traditionalism replaced by beehive hairdos and shiny, glass-walled office buildings. And so, to confront this curious moment in British history, Bradbury turned to the sharpest tool in his arsenal: humor. In All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, he writes of a country balancing precariously on the boundary of two worlds, with the wry wit and keenly observant eye that have made him one of the twentieth century's greatest satirists.

At the height of the 1960s, a British writer accepts an academic post in America for a year that he'll never forget English author James Walker has three books to his name, each greeted with middling success and then promptly forgotten. But his resume is significant enough to earn him a yearlong appointment at Benedict Arnold University as the American college's writer in residence. At Benedict Arnold, Walker is something of a celebrity--a firebrand of 1960s British literary culture whose work, though perhaps met with shrugs at home, is the subject of vibrant scholarly criticism among American academics. Walker, of course, is not quite what some were expecting, and culture clashes abound as he encounters the tropes of American academia in the sixties. Fusty, buttoned-up professors, spirited advocates of free love, and aggressively ambitious colleagues collide to ensure that Walker's year in America will be anything but ordinary.

This first volume of Bradbury's collected critical writings concentrates on British fiction since 1945. It is written from the center of the field it surveys: Bradbury is a writer who is also a critic, a critic who is also a writer. He often feels a conflict between the two roles, but writes in a personal, lucid, and amusing style, alert to modern critical theory yet at the same time deeply involved as a creative novelist.

The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury, is a collection of the finest short stories from our best loved authors, including Samuel Beckett, Graham Greene, William Golding, Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, J. G. Ballard, William Trevor, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Rose Tremain, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro. 'The short story has become one of the major forms of modern literary expression - in some ways the most modern of them all.' The story of the British short story since the Second World War is one of change and revolution and this powerful and moving collection brilliantly demonstrates the evolution of the form. Containing thirty-four of the most widely regarded postwar British writers, it features tales of love and crime, comedy and the supernatural, the traditional as well as the experimental. This many-storied, many-splendored collection is a brilliant portrait of the generation of writers who have immediately influenced the brightest, sharpest and most intriguing writers who continue to emerge today. Malcolm Bradbury was a novelist, critic, television dramatist and professor of American studies and creative writing. He was awarded the CBE in 1991 for his services to Literature and was knighted in the 2000 New Year's Honours List. He died in 2000.

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.