Understanding Beryl Bainbridge
By: Brett Josef Grubisic.
Series: Understanding contemporary British literature
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9781570037566
Subjects: Bainbridge, Beryl, -- 1933- -- Criticism and interpretation
Description: "In this introduction to prolific British novelist Beryl Bainbridge, Brett Josef Grubisic provides a biographical sketch of the writer, discussion of her motivations and techniques, and a detailed survey of her fiction that places the works in the traditions of British black comedy, social novels, and historical fiction. In approaching her works, Grubisic maps Bainbridge's movement from social to historical novels, beginning with the comic historicism of Young Adolf and continuing to her most recent fiction, The Birthday Boys, Every Man for Himself, Master Georgie, and According to Queeney. Grubisic holds that in portraying historical events through a variety of narrative techniques or from oblique vantage points, Bainbridge's latest novels partially ally themselves with the style and ideological concerns of literary postmodernism while still recalling the defining view of hardship established in her youth."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Understanding Beryl Bainbridge; title: Opening strategies: A weekend with Claude, Another part of the wood, and Harriet Said; title: Perilous aspirations: The dressmaker and The bottle factory outing; title: Domestic lives: Sweet William, A quiet life, and Injury time; title: Closures and transitions: Young adolf, Winter garden, Watson's apology, and An awfully big adventure; title: Fictions of history: The birthday boys, Every man for himself, Master georgie, and According to Queeney.