Tensions and Transitions, 1868-1990

Malcolm Bradbury on the old and the new in Ford Madox Ford; Denis Donoghue on formalism as liberation or constraint; David Lodge on the nature of fact in literary fiction. These and the other contributors to this book concern themselves with writing which seeks to resolve contrarities. They look, among other things, at the transition of the Victorian into the modern and the modern into the modernist; at key figures in whom "the new" struggles to emerge like Browning, Pater, Wilde, Hardy, James, Ford, Conrad and Lawrence; and at a still later British generation, specifically that of Kingsley Amis and Harold Pinter, who push the modern towards the contemporary. Three concluding essays explore issues of a more generic or theoretical kind: to do with how fact indeed becomes fiction; with the imaginative relationship of word to world; and with the idea of the literary vocation.