Alan Warren Friedman

De-familiarizing Readings

Unlike many recent Joyce studies, De-familiarizing Readings eschews the theoretical and ideological and instead plants itself on firmer ground. Its seven outstanding Joyce scholars share a love of the “stuff” of texts, contexts, and intertexts: data and dates, food and clothing, letters and journals, literary allusions, and other quotidian desiderata. Their inductive approaches - whether to Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake - are thoroughly researched, argued with meticulous, even nit-picking, precision, and offer the pleasurable reading experience of forensic analysis. And in the end they provide the satisfaction of reaching persuasive conclusions that seem both striking and inevitable.

The Contemporary British Novel@@@Old Lines, New Forces: Essays on the Contemporary British Novel, 1960-1970

Draws together a dozen essays by the foremost contemporary critics of the British novel to examine its growth in the sixties. The collection of critical pieces is devoted to major, minor, and rising novelists who are cultivating the seedbed of contemporary fictional talent in England today.