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by Malcolm Bradbury

This book, in ten succinct essays, examines the ten "greats" of early 20th century literature. In each case the author's most important work is discussed in the context of the author's life, other writings and place in the modernist movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Biography, Essays

282 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[Joe Loftus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book and addictive too.

For modernist writers I have read extensively - Joyce and Dostoevsky, it delivers a great summary and some fresh points too. However it's just as good for writer's you haven't read a word of.

[Panthea · Rating 4 out of 5]

خیلی باید خوره ی کتاب باشی که با این کتاب خیلی حال کنی.
ضمنن بعضی از نویسنده های معرفی شده برای من اصلن آشنا نبودن و هیچی ازشون نخونده بودم. اما اگه همه رو بشناسی کتاب ِ خوبی هست.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

So you wanted to know more about Modernist writers, and you turned to a book that's nearly 30 years old now?
- Yes, I'd had it on my shelf unread for nearly that long, and now seemed as good a time as any.
OK. Did it do the job?
- Up to a point, yes.
What do you mean?
- The ten writers are nicely chosen to give a good cross-section of Modernist writers across time, country/language, and literary form. The essays work well together, and each essay has a good balance of facts about writer's life and work, with in-depth analysis of a key text. Bradbury obviously knows a huge amount about the subject, and the ability to write about it clearly and incisively.
I'm sensing a "but" here. What's not to like?
- Well, I came out of this book with a greater knowledge of Modernist literature and its writers, but not much greater understanding or anticipated appreciation of it. Before reading the book, I didn't care much for Dostoyevsky (from a couple of readings of Crime and Punishment, anyway), reckoned I'd got Ibsen fairly well figured out, liked Joyce and Eliot instinctively without much confidence that I really understood them, was scared of Woolf, thought Pirandello sounded gimmicky, wasn't sure that I was that bothered if I never read Kafka...
And after reading the book?
- Pretty much the same!
So four stars for the book, but fewer for the reader, I think!
- Fair enough. If nothing else, I'm glad that Bradbury read The Magic Mountain for me, so now I don't have to.

[Richard Clay · Rating 3 out of 5]

In its day - 33 years ago - this was a creditable enough introduction to ten writers who were thought to be 'modernist'; its main aim was to make the A-level student, the undergraduate or the general reader want to read them. Unthinkable that such a book might be published today. For a start, there are no longer enough A-level or undergraduate literature students: who these days wants to be 22, have yea much student debt round their neck and nothing more than an English teacher's salary to pay it off? Secondly, only four years later, in 1992, John Carey brought out The Intellectuals and the Masses, in which the woeful politics of Eliot and Woolf among others, here too frequently the elephant in the room, was put under the spotlight. And finally, oh, that wretched word: 'Great'. Tsk. Bradbury's use of it isn't as out-and-out bonkers as the Leavises' was but it's sometimes almost comically post-colonial: 'You got to listen to Heap Big White Man 'cos Heap Big White Man read The Magic Mountain!' The sin is far from being Bradbury's alone, of course, but he represents a generation of English Literature teachers whose assumption that certain works of imaginative writing would always be thought indispensable to civilisation is, lamentably, proving erroneous. This book's way of thinking is clearly on the way out but, really, that's nothing to celebrate. Because a world in which fewer people have read The Magic Mountain, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway is, very marginally, a poorer place.