China Miéville

China Miéville is a British author and a significant writer of Fantastika fiction in the 21st century, his work showcasing a desire to write across a variety of different forms and genres. Miéville is associated with the writing of the New Weird movement, although he does not describe his work in this manner anymore. Born on 6 September 1972 in Norwich, UK, Miéville was brought up and has lived in London for much of his life. Miéville taught English in Egypt for a year before attending university. Here Miéville developed an interest in politics, especially Marxism and socialism, which continues to influence his academic life and creative work. After studying social anthropology at Cambridge, Miéville gained a master’s in 1995 and a PhD in international relations from the London School for Economics in 2001. Miéville found his own political viewpoint being drawn firmly toward Marxism due to feeling dissatisfied with the postmodern theories he was exposed to during his studies. Miéville’s first novel, King Rat, was published in 1998, but it was the following Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) that cemented his reputation as a writer. Miéville wrote Perdido Street Station alongside his PhD studies. His work has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for The City & The City, the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented three times, the British Fantasy Award twice, and Locus Awards four times across different categories. Miéville has been the guest of honor at multiple conventions and conferences, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2018, and has held positions in both politics and creative writing in UK and US higher education institutions. Socialist politics is a constant theme throughout Miéville’s biography and creative work. Miéville was previously a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United Kingdom, leaving the party in 2013 in disgust at the leadership’s attempted suppression and refusal to deal with rape allegations against a party member. He stood for election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 general election for the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North. Alive with creative world-building and experimental representations of monstrous bodies, Miéville’s work challenges the borders between categorization and presents genres as literary spaces that can be both politically engaging and socially relevant.

Irish Crime Fiction

Irish crime fiction is still an emerging field of study. Much of the scholarship concerns Northern Ireland, though that often pays little attention to popular fiction, as is true of Irish Studies more generally. Among the studies most directly concerned with genre fiction, two further focal points are clear. The first is the work of Tana French, among the most prominent Irish crime writers. The second is more general: crime novels read as reflecting on the Celtic Tiger (Ireland’s economic boom in the late 20th and early 21st centuries), on the crash that ensued, and on the cultural complexes arising from and contributing to that boom. Across these focal points, several thematic patterns are clear but not yet fully addressed by scholars: corruption on all sides of the law; a narrative resistance to closure and resolution; Gothic influences; adaptations of domestic noir; and the systemic abuse of women and children by the church, the state, and institutions like the Magdalen Laundries. Indeed, if one category of crime is a defining marker of Irish crime fiction, it is likely to be corruption in all its forms, literal and figurative alike, from Gothic allegories to ripped-from-the-headlines realist narratives. Little attention, however, has been paid to most crime writers predating this contemporary proliferation: even writers who were just barely ahead of the curve—such as Julie Parsons, Vincent Banville, Eugene McEldowney, and Gemma O’Connor—are not regularly addressed at length in scholarly accounts. While Irish contexts and settings distinguish Irish crime fiction from its international counterparts—including the English, Scottish, and American work to which it is most often compared—its particularity is further signaled by several patterns. One is an insistent avoidance of the closure popularly associated with the genre, as in Alan Glynn’s conspiracy thrillers, where uncertainty is an inescapable baseline. Elsewhere, this avoidance reflects Irish literary inheritances like the supernatural, pronounced in the novels of French and John Connolly, and less overt but still clear across their contemporaries’ writings. A third pattern is discernible in the varied means by which Irish writers have adapted familiar subgenres—the police procedural, the private eye, the serial killer—to Irish contexts, which have proven inhospitable to some of these subgenres, a challenge some writers have addressed by setting their work abroad. A final hallmark of Irish crime fiction is a generic instability, a promiscuous mingling of genre elements, including folklore, the supernatural, and romance.

Prosody and Meter: Twentieth Century

If the 19th century was marked by competing systems, debates about how to write metrical poetry in English and disagreement over how to read and teach that poetry once written, then the 20th century was marked by first an artificial consolidation and subsequent rejection of so-called 19th-century “traditions” by the poets and critics associated with literary modernism and second, a reification of stress on the one hand (via Pound and the increased acceptance of “accentual-syllabic” verse form) and the attempt to measure verse form, in all its valences, scientifically, linguistically, and objectively (though never successfully) on the other. On the literary side, debates about “form” and value cycled throughout the century. On the linguistic side, unseating the false dominance, and abstraction, of stress as the main feature of meter was a main goal. Though overviews, histories, theories, and practical guides presented contrary paths, most focus on an unspoken concept of “the literary” as opposed to “the vernacular.” This bibliography therefore has not included a variety of work relating to particular prosodic traditions (Welsh, Irish, “African American,” Black) nor has it included the robust history of Black poetics, with its complicated relationship to the very terms “English prosody” and “English meter” and the latter’s underlying concepts of meter and rhythm. Indeed Black poetics deserves its own bibliography, as does Native American poetics, quite apart from the often exclusionary critical tradition outlined here.

Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is one of the most revered writers of his generation and is globally renowned for his debut novel Trainspotting (1993) and the film adaptation that followed. Though his biography is sketchy—perhaps deliberately so—we can say with some certainty that he was raised in Leith and Muirhouse, Scotland, and that he gained useful life and work experiences in London during the late 1970s and 1980s. His year of birth in Edinburgh is mainly given as 1958, though some reports offer an earlier date. Upon returning to Scotland in the late 1980s, he completed an MBA at Heriot-Watt University (his thesis was based on creating equal opportunities for women), and soon became acquainted with writers such as Alan Warner, Duncan McLean, and Kevin Williamson. Trainspotting was once a series of diary entries that were published in parts from 1991 onward in small independent magazines like DOG and Rebel Inc. Draft sections were also printed in A Parcel of Rogues and Past Tense: Four Stories from a Novel. It was through this network that Welsh became known to the director of Secker & Warburg, who published Trainspotting in its entirety. Set in the late 1980s, the novel was a critique of capitalism, individualism, nationalism, and war. This sweat-lashed, dialect-driven journey into the self and the nation was met with very high critical regard and a good measure of disgust. The novel is said to have missed out on the Booker Prize shortlist for causing offense to female judges. One year later James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late won the same award, much to the bemusement of one or two judges, and so the pair have been entwined as controversial antiestablishment types ever since. For Welsh, his reputation as a writer of mind-bending literature was enhanced with The Acid House (1994) and Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), both showcasing an impressive range of narrative skills. Danny Boyle’s film version of Trainspotting (1996) propelled Welsh into a stratosphere that few Scottish writers have enjoyed, and while three more books were published before the sequel to Trainspotting, Porno (2002), he is chiefly remembered for creating one of the great novels of the late 20th century with his debut. Welsh’s extensive novels, short story collections, and stage and screen plays have kept him at the forefront of the Scottish literary scene, though he has revived the Trainspotting case time and again, most recently with Skagboys (2012), The Blade Artist (2016), and Dead Men’s Trousers (2018).

Frank O'Connor

“O’Connor was, above all, a short story writer,” Maurice Sheehy proposed in the first extended bibliography of the writer’s work (Sheehy 1969, 168). Criticism over the last fifty years has generally endorsed this claim and has concentrated on O’Connor’s work as a practitioner and critic of the genre. Frank O’Connor (b. 1903–d. 1966) was the author of six volumes of short stories, the first of which, Guests of the Nation, appeared in 1931; his last volume, Domestic Relations, was published in 1957. He edited several collections of his own work, beginning with The Stories of Frank O’Connor in 1952, and additional collections were published posthumously; he was also the author of an influential study of short fiction, The Lonely Voice (1962) (see introduction to O’Connor as Short-Story Writer). Broadly speaking, O’Connor’s stories can be grouped into the following clusters: His stories of the 1930s engage with the fight for Irish independence and the subsequent disappointments of life in the newly emergent Free State; they also explore the uneasy relationship between traditional practices and modernizing values. His stories of the 1940s continue this concern with cultural clashes, intensifying the themes of frustration, provincialism, and loneliness, and dramatizing the power and the habitus of the Catholic Church in Ireland. In the late 1940s, O’Connor began writing for the New Yorker, and the impact of this magazine’s style can be seen in his short fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s; a number of stories from this period are narrated from the perspective of a child, many are nostalgic or whimsical, and some carry an autobiographical element. In addition to his short fiction, O’Connor was a novelist, dramatist, essayist, and literary critic; he had varying levels of success in each of these genres. Largely self-taught, he was fluent in Irish, and he was a distinguished translator of texts from the 7th and 8th centuries through to the modern period; his most famous translations include The Lament for Art O’Leary (1940) and The Midnight Court (1945). He was also a memoirist of note, and his first volume of autobiography, An Only Child (1961) is justly acclaimed. O’Connor wrote under the name “Frank O’Connor” throughout his life; this was a pseudonym of sorts, derived from his middle name (Francis) and his mother’s maiden name (O’Connor). His birth name was Michael O’Donovan.

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

French Revolution, 1789–1799

Birthed from national bankruptcy, the French Revolution was a painful political and social transformation that delivered some liberty and fraternity, if less equality, to its participants. While most would agree that our modern political world originated here, there is less consensus in understanding the causes or evolution of what political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a virus of a new and unknown kind.” The complexity of events, and subsequent layers of interpretation, make studying the French Revolution a daunting prospect for any historian; and its role as a key reference point for those either inspired or horrified by its outcomes continues to make it a focus of controversy and debate. A broad consensus concerning its nature—one of class-based conflict—most clearly expressed by French (Marxist) historians, briefly appeared toward the middle of the 20th century; however, this agreement has now been fatally undermined by an onslaught of diversified research findings that dissent from the old orthodoxies, most notably in emphasizing political over social or economic factors. What can be agreed is that the French Revolution was a transformative event. After the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, French revolutionaries suppressed feudal obligations, abolished the nobility (including titles), reorganized the Catholic Church, introduced (limited franchise) elections and a republican government, executed the king, and possibly most significantly, started a war that would draw in most of Europe and reach as far as the Caribbean. Over a quarter of a million people died in civil wars fought within France, hundreds of thousands more in wars with foreign powers, and 40,000 were executed for political crimes as alleged counterrevolutionaries. By 1799, France had tried out four different constitutions at home, imposed new ones on conquered territories in Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and appeared set on revolutionizing most of Europe, with some countries proudly proclaiming their emancipation by adopting the tricolor flag of republican France. After a decade of revolutionary upheaval, fifteen years of rule by France’s new leader, the military dictator and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte restored a degree of stability (and authoritarianism) to France while continuing to impose revolutionary reforms on the rest of Europe.

Science Fiction

There has been a trend for introductory texts on science fiction (SF) criticism to start by announcing that SF is now an increasingly respected genre within academia, with its own canonical texts, major scholars, historical traditions, and theoretical perspectives. An increasing influx of publications, conferences, academic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, doctorate dissertations, and annual awards would seem to testify to this claim. Even further indications of the recognition of the genre’s respectability, the argument goes, lies in the fact that “mainstream” authors now adopt motifs and conventions of the genre within their own writing, when not embracing it wholeheartedly, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name a few. But it is now time to move beyond this approach to introducing SF that, even unconsciously, reproduces dominant assumptions about cultural value, generic integrity, and canon formation that encourage an almost apologetic tone or the need to justify “Why SF?” in academia. The wide range of sources included in this bibliography demonstrate a complex, diverse, multilayered and ever-expanding corpus of critical work extending across numerous academic disciplines, whose emergence and expansion over the last few decades has been so rapid that it has caught up with or even surpassed other established areas of academic inquiry with a much longer history within the university. To use a concept much favored within the field over the last couple of decades, the singularity of science fiction criticism has already happened. This annotated bibliography is aimed at both the uninitiated scholar or student and the academic who specializes in the area, as it provides a list of introductory works, textbooks, and readers—a publication format that witnessed a sudden upsurge during the 2000s. The list will also attract the attention of readers with an interest in historicist approaches or theorizations from the perspective of cultural studies of identity, specifically gender and race.

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford in 1955, the fourth of five children. His childhood was disrupted by the illness of his father Micheál, a teacher, when he was eight. His father’s death four years later in the summer of 1967 occurred just before Tóibín began his secondary school education, after which he entered University College Dublin in 1972 to study English and history. On graduation in 1975 he moved to Barcelona, where he taught English for three years, learned Catalan, and witnessed Spain’s transition to democracy in the aftermath of General Francisco Franco’s death. Following his return to Dublin in 1978, Tóibín embarked on a career in journalism, which culminated in his editorship of Magill magazine between 1982 and 1985. He spent much of the late 1980s abroad, traveling in South America, Africa, and eastern Europe, and returning to Catalonia in 1988 to write Homage to Barcelona (1990), one of three travelogues he published between 1987 and 1994. His novelistic career began in 1990 with The South, set in Ireland and Catalonia, which won the 1991 Irish Times/Aer Lingus First Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. With his next three novels— The Heather Blazing (cited under Novels), The Story of the Night (cited under Novels), and The Blackwater Lightship (cited under Novels)—Tóibín established himself as a highly distinctive voice in contemporary fiction, lauded for the spareness and lucidity of his prose, the delicacy of his psychological realism, and the acuity of his insights into states of exile, silence, loneliness, and grief. The presence of complexly drawn gay protagonists in the last two of these novels also marked Tóibín out as a bold prospector of homosexual identities and intimacies, whose public disclosure of his own gay sexuality in 1993 coincided with the decriminalization of homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland. Within Irish critical circles, the early reception of his work was complicated by Tóibín’s association with historical revisionism and his espousal of a pluralist, post-nationalist society. His fifth novel, The Master (cited under Novels), garnered extensive praise and won the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 2009 novel, Brooklyn (cited under Novels), won the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His novella, The Testament of Mary (cited under Novels), was also shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2013. In addition to his nine novels, Tóibín has authored two volumes of short stories, three plays, a short memoir, and an impressive body of nonfiction that encompasses historical, biographical, and literary-critical studies. He taught at Princeton University from 2009 to 2011 and was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2011. He is currently Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. Recent honors include the 2017 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award and the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the Irish Book Awards in November 2019.

Medieval Manuscripts

Scholars studying medieval manuscripts work in a variety of disciplines, from literary atudies to history to linguistics to art history to classics. Publications in all these areas use manuscripts and offer important findings about medieval manuscripts. In addition to its practice within different fields, much of the study of medieval manuscripts is strongly interdisciplinary, using techniques native to the study of the medieval book like codicology and paleography, alongside text critical-methods originally developed in classics and refined there, in literary studies and in history, visual analysis pioneered in art history, and philological methods now found in literary studies and linguistics. Insofar as the study of medieval manuscripts has a unified goal, it is to describe and explain the production and use of manuscripts and the textual culture associated with them, generating primary data that assists in the writing of literary, cultural, and linguistic history. Given the breadth of the field, this Oxford Bibliographies entry must necessarily be selective. It focuses primarily on manuscripts of British and Irish literature in English (manuscripts of texts in Irish, Welsh, and other Celtic languages being specialist fields of study in their own right). As a consequence, the vast majority of the material listed is in English, though scholarship on medieval manuscripts is also published in French, Italian, and German, as well as other languages. After sections devoted to General Overviews, Reference Works, Textbooks, Anthologies, Bibliographies and Journals, the bibliography presents lists of Catalogues of Manuscripts and Facsimiles, which are two of the most important tools for medieval book historians. It finishes with lists of works relevant to the major subdisciplines of medieval book history, Codicology (the study of the physical structure of manuscripts); paleography, the study of Scripts used in those manuscripts; as well as studies of Scribal Practice and Manuscript Culture; and works concerned with Ownership and Provenance.