This completely updated and expanded second edition of the wide-ranging and accessible Routledge History of Literature in English covers the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature with accompanying language notes exploring the interrelationships between language and literature. Highly praised for its readability and narrative style it charts the principal features of literary language development and highlights key language topics. With a span of over a thousand years, from AD 600 to the present day, it emphasizes the growth of literary writing, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes literature from the margins, both geographical and cultural.
The author assesses the British novel from 1878 to the present day. Major names are represented but one of the many pleasures of Bradbury's approach is the inclusion of writers less known and read yet deserving some place in the history of the novel.
This anthology is in many ways a 'best of the best', containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all...'
