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Julian Barnes is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates his work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy.
It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but along the way it also shows how certain key thematic preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory). Chapters provide detailed readings of each major publication in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes’s fiction, including art, authorship, history, love and religion. The book is very lucidly written, and it is also satisfyingly comprehensive - alongside the 'canonical' Barnes texts, it includes brief but illuminating discussion of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of the fictions of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George also benefits from archival research into his unpublished materials.
The book will be a useful resource for scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates working in the field of contemporary literature.
Acknowledgements
Series Editor’s Foreword
List of Abbreviations
Introduction : Pleasure in Form
1. About to be less deceived: Metroland
2. Silly to Worry About: Before She Met Me
3. What happened to the truth is not recorded: Flaubert’s Parrot
4. Intricate Rented World: Staring at the Sun
5. Safe for Love: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
6. Tell me Yours: Talking it Over and Love, etc.
7. We won’t get fooled again: The Porcupine
8. History doesn’t relate: England, England
9. Retrospectively Imagined Memorials: Cross Channel and The Lemon Table
10. Conviction and Prejudice: Arthur & George
Select Bibliography