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Henry Green Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)

Henry Green By Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)

Summary

Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday combines biography, social-historical context, and close readings of all of Green's novels to provide a clearer vantage-point from which to see into the challenges and pleasures awaiting the reader of Green's fiction.

Henry Green Summary

Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday by Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)

Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday offers a critical prism through which Green's fiction--from his earliest published short stories, as an Eton schoolboy, through to his last dialogic novels of the 1950s--can be seen as a coherent, subtle, and humorous critique of the tension between class, style, and realism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going critical recognition that Green's work is central to the development of the novel from the twenties to the fifties, acting as a vital bridge between late modernist, inter-war, post-war, and postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of the everyday. Consequently, each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy of the writing, whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended, purposefully ambiguous nature of its symbols; the shifting, cinematic nature of Green's prose style; the sensitive, but resolutely unsentimental depictions of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period; the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life; or the ways in which moments or events are rapidly subsumed back into the flux of the everyday, their impact left uncertain. Critics have, historically, offered up singular readings of Green's work, or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works, particularly those of the 1940s. Green's writing is, undoubtedly, poetic and extraordinary, but this book also pays attention to the cliched, meta-textual, and uneventful aspects of his fiction.

Henry Green Reviews

an intelligent, elegant book that takes the need for open-endedness as its premise. * Lara Feigel, Times Literary Supplement *

About Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)

Nick Shepley studied English at Keble College, Oxford, went on to do a PGCE, and became a VSO volunteer in Ondangwa, Namibia, before doing his MA and PhD at University College London. He has been teaching there ever since.

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'A Terrific Dichotomy' 1: Biography: Henry Vincent Yorke, Henry Green, and the early fiction: College Days and Blindness 2: Style: Deconstructing names in Blindness, Living, Party Going, Back, and Concluding 3: Style: Symbolic flight from Living to Party Going 4: Class: The art of not 'going over' in Living, Party Going and Loving 5: The everyday: Caught in Back: The presence of war in daily life 6: The everyday and the non-event: Doting on Nothing Conclusion

Additional information

NPB9780198734758
9780198734758
0198734751
Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday by Nick Shepley (Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, Teaching Fellow in Post-1890 British and American Literature, University College London)
New
Hardback
Oxford University Press
2016-08-04
208
N/A
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