A personal voice: Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Kingsley Amis

2017 ◽  
pp. 15-23
Author(s):  
Linden Bicket

For Scottish Catholic writers of the twentieth century, faith was the key influence on both their artistic process and creative vision. Many of these writers trod in the footsteps of Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh and J. R R. Tolkien by converting to Catholicism. This book offers an absorbing history of the uncharted territory that is Scottish Catholic fiction. By focussing on one of the best-known of Scotland’s literary converts, George Mackay Brown, this book explores both the uniquely Scottish Catholic modernist movement of the twentieth century and the particularities of Brown’s writing which have been routinely overlooked by previous studies. George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination provides sustained and illuminating close readings of key texts in Brown’s corpus, and also discusses the importance of Brown’s unpublished early works, manuscripts and letters. It includes detailed comparisons between Brown’s writing and an established canon of Catholic writers, including Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and Flannery O’Connor. Ultimately, this book contextualises Brown’s place within Scottish Catholic writing, while revealing that Brown’s imagination extended far beyond the ‘small green world’ of Orkney, and embraced a universal human experience.


1989 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 152
Author(s):  
Peter Conradi ◽  
Richard C. Kane

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-117
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington

This chapter assesses the growth of Penelope Fitzgerald’s literary reputation since her death in 2000, and gauges the nature of her influence on other writers. It weighs up contemporary criticism of her work, and suggests that despite the favourable attention given to her life and writing in recent years, including film and radio adaptations of her novels, and Hermione Lee’s full-length biography, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Fitzgerald’s place in the canon of twentieth-century British fiction is not necessarily secure. This is partly because of the difficulty of categorizing Fitzgerald’s work. Her style and sensibility have more in common with her chronological peers, such as post-war novelists Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, than with novelists of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, reviewers of female ironists such as Fitzgerald tend to overplay the benignity of her fiction, as though subtlety and understatement were incommensurate with the exploration of the major questions of life. The chapter concludes by calling on educators, writers, and publishers to support her legacy by continuing to study, adapt and print her works.


Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn

During and after the Second World War, religion informed British literature and culture. Leading writers contributed to discussions about faith and spiritual life, inside and outside organized religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life: salvation and redemption were on many people’s minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic feeling, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied cause. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million people converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Eminent intellectuals, such as Paul Tillich, Ronal Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil, gave concerted thought to religion and statehood, often at the same time. The mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the usual perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and improvement of the lot of humankind. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, ‘what is man?’ It also afforded ways to think about social obligation. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Meyers
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-218
Author(s):  
Heather Ingman

Irish literary gerontology has been slow to develop and this article aims to stimulate discussion by engaging with gerontologists' assertions that ageing in a community of peers is enriching. Juxtaposing the experience of ageing individuals in the novels of Iris Murdoch and John Banville with the more social experiences of John McGahern's protagonists, the article finds parallels between Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Banville's fiction with its emphasis on the ageing individual, invariably male, who attempts to fashion a coherent identity through narration. By contrast, McGahern's The Barracks (1963), is focused through the eyes of a female protagonist whose final months are shaped by interaction with the society around her, while in That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) ageing is experienced through an entire community.


2020 ◽  
pp. 109-115
Author(s):  
Anna Sharova

Anna Sharova reviews two recent books separately published by two English language authors – P. Martell and J. Young. The books are very different in style and mood. While P. Martell presents an excellent example of British journalist prose in the style of his elder compatriots Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who did their reporting and writing from exotic countries during fateful periods of history, J. Young offers a more academic, though no less ‘on the spot’ analysis of the situation in the youngest independent country of Africa. J. Young’s considers two possible approaches to conflict resolution as possible outcomes: non-intervention cum continuation of the war, or the introduction of international governance. P. Martell comes up with a disappointing prediction about the future of South Sudan. The war will go on, the famine will return, and the threat of genocide will not disappear. People will continue to flee the country, and refugee camps will grow. New warring groups will appear, new murders will be committed. Neighbouring states will not stop competing for influence and resources. New peacekeepers will arrive. Warlords will be accused of crimes, but, as before, they will escape punishment, while some will be promoted.


Author(s):  
Sarah Stewart-Kroeker

This chapter takes up the themes of Chapter 3—loving beauty’s formative power—in a dialogue with contemporary philosophers Alexander Nehamas and Elaine Scarry, as well as with (to a lesser extent) Iris Murdoch. It explores the nature of love, beauty, and morality through a dialogue across historical–contemporary, theological–philosophical lines. A number of prominent modern criticisms of Augustine focus on a fundamental feature of his thought: that everything in human life is ordered towards the promise of heavenly happiness. This chapter shows some of the resources Augustine offers contemporary discussions of aesthetics by arguing that the way he links beauty and morality accounts for the ethical demands of love elicited by attraction to beauty.


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