Best Selling Books by Frank Kermode

A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

This is a collection of Frank Kermode''s essays for the ''London Review of Books''.

In this book, which was first published in 1983, Frank Kermode looks in particular at the revived Russian Formalism, a highly original body of literary theory that flourished in the years immediately following the Revolution, and at the work of Roman Jakobson, one of its most distinguished exponents. He discusses its modern ‘structuralist’ descendants, recalling the importance of Roland Barthes and the invigorating effect of his fertile and surprising mind. He considers also the work of Foucault, Laca and Levi-Strauss, as well as that of Jacques Derrida, which uses a novel and de(con)structive method of analysis to question to tacit assumptions on which structuralism is based. In an opening chapter, Professor Kermode surveys his relationship with the new theory, explaining that it is a relation from which he has benefited without ever feeling disposed to join a movement. These essays will be of interest to students of literature.

Continuities, first published in 1968, is a collection of reviews by Frank Kermode that appeared from 1962 to 1967. Kermode discusses a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, including T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Wallace Stevens. History and politics are two important aspects that are discussed in regards to these writers. This book is ideal for students of English literature.

Frank Kermode here returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we seem to have forgotten how urgent and powerful this literature was during a time of economic crisis and imminent world war, discussing bourgeois left-wing writing in England in the 1930s--and, to a lesser extent, in the United States--and addressing the more general question of how literature dies or survives and how we decide whether to attribute value to it.

«Esiste ancora un bisogno di parlare in termini umani dell''importanza della vita: un bisogno, che ci accompagna durante l''esistenza, di appartenersi, di potersi riferire a un inizio e a una fine.» Qual è il rapporto tra romanzo e Apocalisse? In apparenza nessuno. Ma non è quello che pensa Frank Kermode, uno dei più importanti critici letterari del Novecento. La sua tesi, in questo libro ritenuto un classico, è che solo il romanzo abbia ereditato dall''immaginario apocalittico – in un''epoca secolarizzata come la modernità – quel «senso della fine» in cui trova forma la nostra umana pretesa che la vita abbia una struttura, un compimento, e non sia un lento sgocciolare verso il non essere attraverso le riarse sterpaglie del non senso. Apocalisse e romanzo postulano invece un disegno, una trama, una figura di destino, un «non ancora» saturo di possibilità che riscatti e dia senso anche a ciò che è già stato. Il senso della fine è oggi attualissimo, ora che l''immagine dell''Apocalisse, nella forma della catastrofe ecologica da noi stessi provocata, è tornata a bussare alle nostre porte, agitata da profeti veri o falsi che siano.

Can you remember what happens at the end of 1984? Or what triggered Quentin Compson''s suicide in The Sound and the Fury? Perhaps you need to know who won the National Book Award in 1960, how many times the Booker Prize has been awarded to non-British writers, or what novels people were reading the year the Titanic sank. The answers to all these questions, and many more, can now be found in A Reader''s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel. Wide-ranging and authoritative, A Reader''s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel is a unique and invaluable guide to modern fiction written in English. Arranged chronologically from Joseph Conrad''s Lord Jim to E. Annie Proulx''s The Shipping News, it contains detailed accounts of some 750 novels from the United States, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean. All of the century''s major novelists are represented, alongside less-celebrated writers whose work has been unjustly neglected; such beloved children''s authors as A.A. Milne, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Kenneth Grahame, and such popular authors as Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Daphne Du Maurier, and others whose work has left a definite stamp on readers'' imaginations. Each lively entry supplies a summary of the plot, places the novel in a biographical and historical context, and provides a provocative critical assessment. Written by a team of thirty-eight contributors made up of critics, biographers, novelists, historians, academics, and literary journalists, all entries are fully cross-referenced and supplemented at the end of the book by brief biographical notes on all authors and by helpful alphabetical indexes of novels and authors. Interwoven with the entries are also 150 short extracts illustrating the voice and style of many featured novels, from Rudyard Kipling''s Kim to Roddy Doyle''s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The chronological arrangement of the Guide gives readers fascinating insight into the sorts of books people were reading at any given period, and each year is prefaced by a selection of contemporary events from the worlds of the arts, science, and politics, revealing the background against which novels were written and published. This arrangement also allows readers to trace the literary history of twentieth-century fiction and to follow the development of individual authors. A celebration of modern fiction and an indispensable aide-memoire, A Reader''s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel is a book to be read for pleasure as well as consulted for reference.