Ivy Compton-Burnett

The first fully detailed and critically contextualised study of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett
Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging.
This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.
Key Features
Provides incisive and accessible close readings of Compton-Burnett's language, life-narratives, emotional expression and thoughtPresents new work of a leading criticPlaces Compton-Burnett in the context of Modernist writing

“Barbara Hardy's brilliantly incisive reading of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction will be a revelation. In her hands Compton-Burnett's lethally laconic writing takes on poetic intensity and social meaning. Hardy reveals its Brechtian coolness, its simultaneously classical and postmodern complexity, its language games, its scandalously detached way of probing the scandalous. The secrets and lies, the power relations of everyday life exposed in the handing of a cup of tea or the cutting of a cake come alive for us. A startling narrative imagination, devastating and profound, a major novelist of our time, emerges from this tour de force of criticism.”

Barbara Hardy's account of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing is as witty and probing as the author she studies. Hardy writes with flair and compassion about a writer full of powerful contradictions. She sends the reader back to the novels newly alert to their tonic insights and their fierce comedy.-- "Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge"
--University of London "Isobel Armstrong"

Barbara Hardy, formally Professor of English Literature Emeritus, Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Welsh Academy, and Hon. Member of the Modern Languages Association.

AUTHOR-APPROVED'Barbara Hardy's brilliantly incisive reading of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction will be a revelation. In her hands Compton-Burnett's lethally laconic writing takes on poetic intensity and social meaning. Hardy reveals its Brechtian coolness, its simultaneously classical and postmodern complexity, its language games, its scandalously detached way of probing the scandalous. The secrets and lies, the power relations of everyday life exposed in the handing of a cup of tea or the cutting of a cake come alive for us. A startling narrative imagination, devastating and profound, a major novelist of our time, emerges from this tour de force of criticism.'Isobel Armstrong, University of London'Barbara Hardy's account of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing is as witty and probing as the author she studies. Hardy writes with flair and compassion about a writer full of powerful contradictions. She sends the reader back to the novels newly alert to their tonic insights and their fierce comedy.'Dame Gillian Beer, University of CambridgeThe first fully detailed and closely analytic study of the novels of Ivy Compton-BurnettIvy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.Key Features Provides incisive and accessible close readings of Compton-Burnett's language, life-narratives, emotional expression and thought Presents new work of a leading critic Places Compton-Burnett in the context of Modernist writing Introduces a new interpretation of Compton-Burnett's superficially conservative politics, in discussion of the relation of 'the creature to its circumstance'Barbara Hardy is Professor of English Literature Emeritus, Birkbeck, University of London, Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Welsh Academy, and Hon. Member of the Modern Languages Association. Cover design:[EUP logo] BN (cover): 978-1-4744-0135-7ISBN (PPC): 978-1-4744-0134-0 Barcode

The first fully detailed and critically contextualised study of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging. This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England. Key Features Provides incisive and accessible close readings of Compton-Burnett's language, life-narratives, emotional expression and thought Presents new work of a leading critic Places Compton-Burnett in the context of Modernist writing

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