ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 1985
Jezik: Engleski
Vrsta: Istorija svetske književnosti
Autor: Strani

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE

The Oxford Companion to English Literature`, edited by Margaret Drabble.

Oxford: Oxford University Press [0-19-866130-4] [1985], 5th edition. (Hardcover) 1155pp. Very good plus in very good plus dust jacket. Blue cloth with gilt crest on the spine. Appendices, tables.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature, first published in 1932, edited by the retired diplomat Sir Paul Harvey (1869–1948), was the earliest of the Oxford Companions to appear. It is currently in its seventh edition (2009), edited by Dinah Birch. The work, which has been periodically updated, includes biographies of prominent historical and leading contemporary writers in the English language, entries on major works, `allusions which may be encountered`, significant (serial) publications and literary clubs. Writers in other languages are included when they have affected the Anglophone world. The Companion achieved `classic status` with the expanded fifth edition edited by novelist and scholar Margaret Drabble, and the book was often referred to as `The Drabble`

DRABBLE, Margaret (1939– ), novelist, born in Sheffield, the daughter of a barrister, and educated at The Mount School, York, and Newnham College, Cambridge. After a brief and undistinguished career as a walk-on with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, she published her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, in 1963, a short, first-person account of the relationship between two young graduate sisters. This was followed by other novels: The Garrick Year (1964), with a theatre background; The Millstone (1966), the story of Rosamund Stacey, a young, academic, unmarried mother; Jerusalem the Golden (1968), about the social ambitions of a girl from the North who comes to London; The Waterfall (1969), the story of a passionate and adulterous love affair; The Needle’s Eye (1972), which portrays English heiress Rose Vassiliou in her struggle to find virtue and simplicity through voluntary poverty; The Realms of Gold (1975), which portrays in Frances Wingate an ambitious, successful career woman who had achieved international recognition as an archaeologist; The Ice Age (1977), a condition-of-England novel documenting the effect of the oil crisis on Britain’s social attitudes; and The Middle Ground (1980), an apparently narrower domestic novel centred on the life of a woman journalist doubting her own feminist creed in the multiracial turmoil of London.

The novels show an allegiance to traditional Realism, of both the French and English schools, and Drabble has acknowledged the influence of George Eliot, Arnold Bennett (of whom she wrote a critical biography, published in 1974), Zola, and Angus Wilson. Her early novels deal primarily with the dilemma of the educated young woman caught in the conflicting claims of maternity, sexuality, and intellectual and economic aspiration; her later novels (written when her own three children were physically less time-consuming) have a broader canvas, a more ironic relationship with traditional narration, and a wider interest in documenting social change.

Her other works include a short study (1966) of William Wordsworth and an account of the interconnections of literature and our perception of landscape, A Writer’s Britain (1979), an example of the renewed interest in topographical writing, with illustrations which range from St. Cuthbert to G. M. Hopkins, Dickens, A. M. Henri, and Nell Dunn. She is the editor of the new, much-revised fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985), on which she worked for some five years, from 1979 onwards. Her sister, A. S. Byatt, is also a novelist, and she is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd. Margaret Drabble has also reviewed for various periodicals, contributed to many broadcasts, and lectured at home and abroad for the Arts Council and the British Council. She taught for several years in adult education at Morley College. In 1980 she was awarded the CBE for her services to English Literature.

Dobro očuvana knjiga.

eng.