Publisher's Synopsis
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.
