This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language.
Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars
Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field
Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works
Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
Author Biography:
Brian W. Shaffer is Professor ofEnglish and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for FacultyDevelopment at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publicationsinclude Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998),and Reading the Novel in English 1950 2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrad s Heart ofDarkness and The Secret Sharer (2002),and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and theeditor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel1945 2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005). Patrick O Donnell is Professor ofEnglish and American Literature at Michigan State University, USA.His previous works include Echo Chambers:Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992), LatentDestinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (2000),and The American Novel Now (Wiley-Blackwell 2010). David W. Madden is Professor ofEnglish at California State University, Sacramento, USA. He is theauthor of Understanding Paul West (1993) and theeditor of Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (1995). Justus Nieland is AssistantProfessor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He haswritten many papers in the fields of modernism, the avant-garde,and film studies, and is author of Feeling Modern:The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008). John Clement Ball is Professor ofEnglish at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, specializing inpostcolonial and Canadian fiction. He is the author of Satire and thePostcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, SalmanRushdie (2003) and ImaginingLondon: Postcolonial Fiction and the TransnationalMetropolis (2004).
