1. The most up-to-date coverage of the Booker Prize for the last 27 years - offers critique and literary analysis as well as a fascinating history 2. Book prizes are a popular topic of study/research in relation to contemporary fiction but there has been very little published on this so far 3. Other books on the topic are either out of date, or don't offer the year by year coverage of ours

1. The most up-to-date coverage of the Booker Prize for the last 27 years - offers critique and literary analysis as well as a fascinating history 2. Book prizes are a popular topic of study/research in relation to contemporary fiction but there has been very little published on this so far 3. Other books on the topic are either out of date, or don't offer the year by year coverage of ours

This is a telling assessment of the divergent works of a daring British writer. ""Understanding Julian Barnes"" surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes' distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes' greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes' fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue surrounding his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

Novelist, playwright, teleplaywright, and literary critic, David Lodge ranks as one of English literature's most overlooked and under-appreciated writers of modern fiction. In this new critique, Merritt Moseley examines the many facets of Lodge the man and Lodge the writer, his Catholic and University education, his origins in England's literary rebirth of the 1950s, and his unique ability for fictive change.

"Academia in Fact and Fiction" comprises twenty-eight essays on the relationship(s) between the university and the practice of belles lettres. The collection includes studies of the teaching of fiction by university professors; the fit - or misfit - between the creative writer and the academy; the depiction of the university, its staff and atmosphere, in literature, cinema and new media; and the varieties of academic fiction ranging from the ludic and satirical to the tragic. Most of the works addressed in the volume are British or American, modern or contemporary, but the historical range extends to Victorian and Shakespearian works, and the geographical range includes novels and poems from Russia, New Zealand, and Nigeria. Among the genres discussed are, in addition to the "literary novel", plays, detective fiction, fanfiction, utopias, mysteries and alternative history. The contributors are international and cosmopolitan.

Pat Barker is one of the most important authors of her time. Her fiction has won many awards - including the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the last novel in her celebrated Regeneration trilogy - and has attracted much critical attention. This stimulating Guide examines the key critical responses to the full range of Barker's fiction, from newspaper reviews and journal articles to revealing interviews and book-length scholarship. Merritt Moseley also explores the central themes which run through Barker's novels and the criticism, such as the issues of gender, class, social realism, violence and trauma. Tracing the development of Barker's fiction through the surrounding critical works, this is an indispensable volume for anyone with an interest in one of Britain's most popular and widely-studied contemporary writers.

In Understanding Jonathan Coe, the first full-length study of the British novelist, Merritt Moseley surveys a writer whose experimental technique has become increasingly well received and critically admired. Coe is the recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Priz du Meilleur Livre Entranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for Fiction, and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. His oeuvre includes eleven novels and three biographies--two of famous Hollywood actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart and one of English modernist novelist B. S. Johnson. Following an introductory overview of Coe's life and career, Moseley examines Coe's complex engagement with popular culture, his experimental technique, his political satire, and his broad-canvased depictions of British society. Though his first three books, An Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, and The Dwarves of Death, received little notice upon publication, Moseley shows their strengths as literary works and as precursors. In 1994 Coe gained visibility with What a Carve Up!, which has remained his most admired and discussed novel. He has since published a postmodern take on sleep disorders and university students, The House of Sleep; a two-volume roman-fleuve consisting of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle; a touching account of a lonely woman's life, The Rain before It Falls; a satiric vision of a misguided life, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim; and a domestic comedy thriller set at the 1958 world's fair in Brussels, Expo '58. Moseley explicates these works and discusses the recurring features of Coe's fiction: political consciousness, a deep artistic concern with the form of fiction, and comedy.

This text systematically presents career biographies of British fantasy and science fiction writers from 1918-1960.