The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism) by Vanessa Guignery

by Vanessa Guignery

Julian Barnes's work has been marked by great variety, ranging not only from conventional fiction to postmodernist experimentation in such well-known novels as Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), but also from witty essays to deeply touching short stories. The responses of readers and critics have likewise varied, from enthusiasm to scepticism, as the substantial volume of critical analysis demonstrates.


This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the essential criticism on Barnes's work, drawing from a selection of reviews, interviews, essays and books. Through the presentation and assessment of key critical interpretations, Vanessa Guignery provides the most wide-ranging examination of his fiction and non-fiction so far, considering key issues such as his use of language, his treatment of history, obsession, love, and the relationship between fact and fiction. Covering all of the novels to date, from Metroland (1981) to Arthur and George (2005), this is an invaluable introduction to the work of one of Britain's most exciting and popular contemporary writers.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011 and Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois) in April 2017. She was a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2016, and has been a University Affiliate and Scholar there since 2010 for periods of one up to six months. She was a Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France between 2012 and 2017, and is now a Honorary member. In 2020-21, she was awarded a one-year delegation with the CNRS research unit ITEM, specialised in genetic criticism.

Vanessa Guignery is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including Julian Barnes from the Margins. Exploring the Writer’s Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, the webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She has published articles on Jonathan Coe, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Janet Frame, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Alice Munro, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n'est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010) and edited the correspondence between B.S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (PUF, 2012) and of a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2016). She is the editor and co-editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English and regularly conducts interviews with writers. From 2000 to 2009, she co-directed the research center ERCLA ("Writings of the Contemporary Novel in English") at the University of La Sorbonne. She is a permanent member of the CNRS research unit IHRIM.

Reviews

[Ryan Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guignery is an amazing Barnes scholar who writes extremely well. A must for studying Barnes's works.