MALCOLM BRADBURY
Nationality: British. Born: Sheffield, Yorkshire, 1932. Education: West
Bridgford Grammar School, Nottingham, 1943-50; University College, Leicester,
1950-53, B.A. in English (1st class honours) 1953; Queen Mary College,
University of London (research scholar), 1953-55, M.A. in English 1955; Indiana
University, Bloomington (English-Speaking Union fellow), 1955-56; University of
Manchester, 1956-58, Ph.D. in American Studies 1962; Yale University, New
Haven, Connecticut (British Association for American Studies fellow), 1958-59.
Career: staff tutor in literature and drama, Department of Adult Education,
University of Hull, Yorkshire, 1959-61; lecturer in English, University of
Birmingham, 1961-65. Lecturer, 1957-67, senior lecturer, 1967-69, reader in
English, 1969-70, professor of American studies, 1970-95, and since 1995
professor emeritus, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Visiting professor,
University of California, Davis, 1966; visiting fellow, All Souls College,
Oxford, 1969; visiting professor, University of Zurich, 1972; Fanny Hurst
Professor, Washington University, St. Louis, 1982; Davis Professor, University
of Queensland, Brisbane, 1983; visiting professor, Griffith University, Nathan,
Queensland, 1983, University of Birmingham, 1989, University of Hull, 1994;
University of Nottingham, 1996. Series editor, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, for
Arnold publishers, London, 1971-84, and Contemporary Writers series for Methuen
publishers, London. Awards: American Council of Learned Societies fellowship,
1965; Royal Society of Literature Heinemann award, 1976; Rockefeller
fellowship, 1987; Emmy award, for television series, 1988; Monte Carlo
Television Festival award, 1991. D. Litt.: University of Leicester, 1986;
University of Birmingham, 1989; University of Hull, 1994. Fellow, Royal Society
of Literature, 1973; Honorary Fellow, Queen Mary College, 1984. C.B.E.
(Commander, Order of the British Empire), 1991. Agent: Curtis Brown, 4th Floor,
Haymarket House, Haymarket, London SW1Y 4SP, England; or, 10 Astor Place, New
York, New York 10003, U.S.A.
PUBLICATIONS
Novels
Eating
People Is Wrong. London, Secker and Warburg, 1959; NewYork, Knopf, 1960.
Stepping
Westward. London, Secker and Warburg, 1965; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1966; New
York, Penguin, 1995.
The History
Man. London, Secker and Warburg, 1975; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
Rates of
Exchange. London, Secker and Warburg, and New York, Knopf, 1983.
Cuts: A Very
Short Novel. London, Hutchinson, and New York, Harper, 1987.
Doctor Criminale.
London, Secker and Warburg, and New York, Viking Penguin, 1993.
To the
Hermitage. London, Picador, 2000.
Short
Stories
Who Do You
Think You Are? Stories and Parodies. London, Secker and Warburg, 1976;
augmented edition, London, Arena, 1984.
Plays
Between
These Four Walls (revue), with David Lodge and JamesDuckett (produced
Birmingham, 1963).
Slap in the
Middle (revue), with others (produced Birmingham, 1965).
The After
Dinner Game, with Christopher Bigsby (televised 1975).Included in The After
Dinner Game, 1982.
Love on a
Gunboat (televised 1977). Included in The After Dinner Game, 1982.
Standing In
for Henry (televised 1980). Included in The After Dinner Game, 1982.
The Enigma,
from the story by John Fowles (televised 1980). Included inThe After Dinner
Game, revised edition, 1989.
The After
Dinner Game: Three Plays for Television. London, Arrow, 1982; revised edition
(includes The Enigma), London, Arena, 1989.
Inside
Trading: A Comedy in Three Acts. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Heinemann, 1997.
Radio Plays:
Paris France
(documentary), 1960; This Sporting Life, with Elizabeth Bradbury, from the
novel by David Storey, 1974; Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from
Married Life, with Elizabeth Bradbury, from the novels by William Cooper, 1975-
1976; Patterson, with Christopher Bigsby, 1981; Congress, 1981; See a Friend
This Weekend, 1985.
Television
Plays:
The After
Dinner Game, with Christopher Bigsby, 1975; Stones (The Mind Beyond series),
with Christopher Bigsby, 1976; Love on a Gunboat, 1977; The Enigma, from the
story by John Fowles, 1980; Standing In for Henry, 1980; Blott on the Landscape
series, from the novel by Tom Sharpe, 1985; Porterhouse Blue series, from the
novel by Tom Sharpe, 1987; Imaginary Friends series, from the novel by Alison
Lurie, 1987; Anything More Would Be Greedy series, 1989; The Gravy Train
series, 1990; The Green Man series, from the novel by Kingsley Amis, 1990; The
Gravy Train Goes East series, 1992; Cold Comfort Farm, from the novel by Stella
Gibbons, 1995.
Poetry
Two Poets,
with Allan Rodway. Nottingham, Byron Press, 1966.
Other
Phogey! How
to Have Class in a Classless Society. London, Parrish, 1960.
All Dressed
Up and Nowhere to Go: The Poor Man's Guide to the Affluent Society. London,
Parrish, 1962.
Evelyn
Waugh. Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1964.
What Is a
Novel? London, Arnold, 1969.
The Social
Context of Modern English Literature. Oxford, Blackwell, and New York,
Schocken, 1971.
Possibilities:
Essays on the State of the Novel. London, OxfordUniversity Press, 1973.
The Outland
Dart: American Writers and European Modernism(lecture). London, Oxford
University Press, 1978.
All Dressed
Up and Nowhere to Go (revised editions). London, Pavilion-Joseph, 1982.
The
Expatriate Tradition in American Literature. Durham, BritishAssociation for
American Studies, 1982.
Saul Bellow.
London, Methuen, 1983.
The Modern
American Novel. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983; revised
edition, 1991.
Why Come to
Slaka? London, Secker and Warburg, 1986; New York, Penguin, 1988.
My Strange
Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism's Hidden Hero. London, Deutsch, 1987; New
York, Penguin, 1988.
No, Not
Bloomsbury (essays). London, Deutsch, 1987; New York, Columbia University
Press, 1988.
The Modern
World: Ten Great Writers. London, Secker and Warburg, 1988; New York, Viking,
1989.
Unsent
Letters: Irreverent Notes from a Literary Life. London, Deutsch, and New York,
Viking, 1988.
From
Puritanism to Postmodernism: The Story of American Literature, with Richard
Ruland. London, Routledge, 1991.
The Modern
British Novel. London, Secker and Warburg, 1994.
Dangerous
Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London, Secker and
Warburg, 1995; New York, Viking, 1996.
Editor,
Forster: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey,
Prentice Hall, 1966.
Editor,
Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins, byMark Twain. London,
Penguin, 1969.
Editor, E.M.
Forster: A Passage to India: A Casebook. London, Macmillan, 1970.
Editor, with
Eric Mottram, U.S.A., in The Penguin Companion to Literature 3. London,
Penguin, and New York, McGraw Hill, 1971.
Editor, with
James McFarlane, Modernism 1890-1930. London, Penguin, 1976; Atlantic
Highlands, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1978.
Editor, The
Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Manchester, Manchester
University Press, and Totowa, New Jersey, Rowman and Littlefield, 1977; revised
edition, London, Fontana, 1990.
Editor, with
Howard Temperley, Introduction to American Studies. London, Longman, 1981;
revised edition, 1989; third edition, New York, Longman, 1998.
Editor, The
Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. London, Dent, 1983.
Editor, The
Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories. London, Viking, 1987; New York,
Viking, 1988.
Editor, with
others, Unthank: An Anthology of Short Stories from the M.A. in Creative
Writing at the University of East Anglia. Norwich, University of East Anglia
Centre for Creative and Performing Arts, 1989.
Editor, The
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, by WashingtonIrving. London,
Dent/Everyman, 1993.
Editor, The
Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. London, Dent/Everyman, 1993.
Editor,
Present Laughter: An Anthology of Modern Comic Short Stories. London,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994.
Editor, The
Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. London, Dent/Everyman, 1995.
Editor,
Class Work: An Anthology of 25 Years of Creative Writing at UEA. London, Hodder
and Stoughton, 1995.
Editor, The
Atlas of Literature. New York, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996.
Critical
Studies:
"Fictions
of Academe" by George Watson, in Encounter (London), November 1978;
"Images of Sociology and Sociologists in Fiction" by John Kramer, in
Contemporary Sociology (Washington, D.C.), May 1979; "The Business of
University Novels" by J.P. Kenyon, in Encounter (London), June 1980;
"Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man: The Novelist as Reluctant
Impresario" by Richard Todd, and interview with Todd, in Dutch Quarterly
Review (Amsterdam), vol. 2, 1981-1983; interviews in The Radical Imagination
and the Liberal Tradition edited by Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby,
London, Junction, 1982, with Ronald Hayman, in Books and Bookmen (London),
April 1983, with Alastair Morgan, in Literary Review (London), October 1983,
and in Novelists in Interview by John Haffenden, London, Methuen, 1985; article
by Melvin J. Friedman, in British Novelists since 1960 edited by Jay L. Halio,
Detroit, Gale, 1983; The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge by
Robert A. Morace, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989; article
by Richard Todd, in Post-War Literatures in English: A Lexicon of Contemporary
Authors, Bouhn Stafleu, Holland, 1994
(1996) I
suppose my fiction—six novels and a volume of short stories, as well as many
television scripts and film screenplays, and three "television
novels"—roughly follows the pattern, the styles and cultural and moral
concerns, that have run through British fiction over the now five decades over
which I've been writing. I began writing fiction in the 1950s when, in the
period after the defeat of fascism, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and
the nuclear bomb, the novel in Britain moved back toward social and moral
realism. In the wake of those events, there was also a strong concern with the
problems affecting liberal and humanistic values. In fact if my books do
possess one consistent theme (I believe they do), then that is their concern
with the problems of liberalism, humanism, and general moral responsibility in
the late 20th-century world.
In my
earlier novels (Eating People Is Wrong, Stepping Westward), the central
characters are concerned if confused moral agents, liberals not in the
political but the moral sense, trying to do a reasonable amount of good in a
difficult world, generally with comic, ironic or near-tragic results. I wrote
Eating People is Wrong when I was 20 and was a university undergraduate,
fascinated by the liberal universe of academic life, a place of often confused
humanism and idealistic goodwill. I revised it a little later to make it more a
retrospective general portrait of intellectual life in the British 1950s. With
Stepping Westward, the result of several years in American universities as a
graduate student, and about an American campus in the troubled years of
anti-liberal sentiment that came from the witch-hunting of Senator McCarthy, I
became interested in the different transatlantic meanings of liberalism, and I
also began to explore my sense that humanism was in conflict with the hard
realities of cold war politics and also with an age of materialist obsessions,
self-seeking, and desire.
That theme
is treated with a far harsher irony in The History Man, set in British academic
life in the aftermath of the student revolutions of 1968. Its central
character, Howard Kirk, is a radical sociologist who believes he is the
spokesperson of a Marxist revolutionary process—history itself—that will still
sweep away everything in its path; he tries to seduce his students and his
colleagues into his bed and into the radical future. It is an ironic and a
somewhat dark novel, as its liberal characters become incompetent in the face
of inhumane theory and ideology. My next novel, Rates of Exchange, written at
the beginning of the 1980s, is somewhat more hopeful. Dealing with various
visits to Eastern European countries and my feeling that the rigid grid of the
Marxist state was being increasingly undermined by the playfulness of language
and the enduring power of the human imagination, it is set in an imaginary
Eastern European state, Slaka, which is undergoing a language revolution. Its
central character is a magical realist novelist, Katya Princip, who uses
fiction to break free of ideology—and who in a later incarnation (see further
on) becomes president of the country after it finally throws off its Stalinism.
Like a number of British novelists I had also by now become fascinated by the
opportunities of television drama in Britain. My next book, Cuts: A Very Short
Novel, deals with this. A comedy about the making of what proves an abortive
television series in the monetarist years of Mrs Thatcher's 1980s, it is about
cuts in two senses: the cuts to British services that happened in the New
Conservative 1980s, and the filmic technique of cutting.
Since some
of these books are set in or around universities, I have often been thought of
as a "campus novelist," and described as a progenitor of what is now
called "the university novel." This is true to a point: I was a
first-generation university student fascinated by the strangeness of the
academic and intellectual world, and so made it fictional country. I have also
spent most of my adult life teaching in universities in a number of countries;
I am a professor of American studies and a teacher of creative writing, though
now part-time; I have written a good deal of literary criticism, and been
influenced by it. So my first book is set in a British redbrick in the 1950s,
when it was a place of social change; my second is set on American campus near
the Rockies at the start of the 1960s when it seemed a place of liberation; my
third is set in a British new university as the 1960s died and the 1970s began,
and radical hopes were beginning to be replaced by hard economic realities. I
see them more as books about their decades, their themes, ideas, emotions, hypocrisies,
intellectual fashions, and preoccupations; a university environment means that
I can write about historically self-conscious and self-critical characters, the
types who most interest me. I most see myself as a comic novelist, mixing
satirical and ironic social and intellectual observation with play and parody.
If I started writing in a time when the British novel was both thematically and
technically provincial, I have tried to break out of that and become a more
cosmopolitan, international, and technically elaborate writer. In Rates of
Exchange, for example, I sought to find not only a larger subject matter, the
question of what ideology we seek to live by in the late 20th century, but also
a different language; in fact much of the novel exploits the technique of using
English spoken by non-native speakers as its tone of voice.
My books
have thus changed considerably over the years (and will continue to do so), but
so has British fiction, which during the later 1960s and 1970s grew far more
cosmopolitan and technically varied. As writer and critic, I have been very
interested in postmodern experiment and found many of my more recent influences
abroad. From The History Man onward, my books became harsher in tone, more
elaborate technically, and they challenge some of the traditional ideas of
character, realism of presentation, and moral confidence with which British
novels have so often been written. Rates of Exchange thus deals with the
problem of the British writer who uses a language deeply changed by its modern
role as a lingua franca, and a world where stories become less reassuring and
more ambiguous. This probably makes some of my later works rather more ironic,
parodic, and less companionable, though I also think it makes them better.
During the 1980s, for various reasons, I also found myself using the form of
what I think of as the "television novel," that is, novel-like forms
and ideas written and produced as television series. I liked television's
immediacy, its rich techniques, its fast narrative pace. Anything More Would Be
Greedy, a six-part series for Anglia Television, is about a group of students
growing older, richer, and ever more cynical in Mrs Thatcher's entrepreneurial
Britain; while The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train: The Economic Miracle
(forthcoming) are both four-part drama series for Channel 4, dealing ironically
with the European Community as it reaches toward the great late 20th century
dream of European integration. The second series is once again about Slaka,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its attempts under President Katya
Princip to join the mysterious entity of "Europe."
So my
concerns and interests have widened. My sixth novel, Doctor Criminale, is a
comedy about a tainted philosopher who has been a powerful intellectual
influence during the Cold War period, and is now being seen as the philosopher
of the Nineties. It's my attempt to deal with the great transformation that
came with the end of the 45-year Cold War era, and to capture the climate as
the new century, indeed a new millennium, approaches. I have continued to write
regularly in a wide variety of media—books, television, film, and radio—and
both in fiction and non-fiction, especially literary criticism and,
increasingly, journalism. Having now retired from university teaching—mostly
recently the teaching of creative writing—and working as a full-time writer, I
am, though, returning ever more refreshed to the novel. I still think of it as
my primary and essential form—an ever-changing form that inevitably alters a
good deal in history for any writer who isn't chiefly concerned with
perpetuating the popular genres or simply providing entertainment.
I view my
books as works of comic and satirical observation, which amongst other things
explore both the decades in which they're set, and the changing moods and modes
of fiction. Socially they explore the moral 1950s, the radical 1960s, the
cautious 1970s, the entrepreneurial 1980s, and now the nervous and increasingly
cynical 1990s. In form they shift from moral comedy to harder irony, where the
comic more nearly touches the tragic. I stay fascinated by fiction's
fictionality, and regard all our forms of exploring knowledge as forms of
fiction-making, which is one reason why I regard the novel as central. Since it
acknowledges its fictionality, and often explores its own method and declares
its own scepticism, it stays at best one of our chief ways of discovering and
naming the world. At the same time it depends on a sense of truth, a feeling
for reality, a response to the authentic experience of individual humanity.
And, if my books are satirical explorations of current confusion, pain, and
inauthenticity, they hardly (as some critics have said) betoken the end of
humanism. In fact the novel belongs with the spirit of "liberalism,"
in the better sense of that word: the challenging of ideologies, intellectual
fashions and inhuman systems or theories through sympathy and the imagination.
Which is why I think the novel is always under challenge, but is far from dead.
Ever since
the 1959 publication of his first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, Malcolm
Bradbury has been regarded as an extremely witty satirist, lampooning topical
phenomena and issues. He excels in group scenes: the cautiously wild and
slap-stick university party that mixes faculty and students in Eating People Is
Wrong ; the American faculty committee meeting to choose a writer-in-residence
that begins Stepping Westward and is ironically contrasted with the concluding
one a year later; the department meeting that combines haggling over procedure,
trivia, several forms of self-seeking, and genuine academic concerns in The
History Man ; the adult education class that was apparently cut from Eating
People Is Wrong and, in revised form, printed in the collection of Who Do You
Think You Are? ; the guest lectures of and alcoholic lunches for the English
linguist on a two-week tour of the country in "central Eastern
Europe" that prides itself on "clean tractors" and a
"reformed watercress industry" in Rates of Exchange. All these pieces
bring people, representing various points of view on some current question of
politics or communal definition, into sharp, comically outrageous conflict or
misunderstanding.
Bradbury
often castigates a whole contemporary milieu through scenes like the
"with-it," consciously "existential" party, a license for
free self-definition, arranged by the "new university" sociologist,
Howard Kirk, in The History Man. Bradbury also exploits his talent for mimicry
of current attitudes, modes of speech (like the variety of ways to mangle
English in Rates of Exchange), and the style and themes of other writers. A
long section of Who Do You Think You Are?, for example, contains astringent
parodies of Snow, Amis, Murdoch, Braine, Sillitoe, and others, along with less
biting and salient echoes of Angus Wilson and Lawrence Durrell. The use of Amis
(with whose early work Bradbury's has often been compared) is particularly
resonant. Like Amis, Bradbury sometimes includes characters from one fiction in
another, like the free-loving psychologist, Flora Beniform, who is both Howard
Kirk's uncommitted mistress in The History Man and a central character on the
television panel concerning modern sexual mores satirized in the story
"Who Do You Think You Are?" As an in-joke, Bradbury even appropriates
the Amis character who doesn't appear, the fraudulent L.S. Caton used in a
number of novels until Amis finally killed him off in The Anti-Death League.
Bradbury makes him a professor, scheduled to visit Benedict Arnold University
in the U.S. to give a lecture on the "angry young men," who never
arrives. In spite of all the critical comparisons and interlocking references,
Bradbury's satire is different from Amis's, Bradbury generally more concerned
with issues and ideas, less implicitly committed to pragmatic success in the
world or, until the recent Rates of Exchange, to mocking various forms of
contemporary incompetence.
Much of
Bradbury's fiction takes place within a university setting: the provincial
red-brick during the 1950s in Eating People Is Wrong, the American university
in the flat wilderness of the Plains states in Stepping Westward the new south
coast university in 1972 in The History Man. Yet, as Bradbury himself has
rightly insisted, the applications of his fiction extend beyond the university,
just as the implications of his moral treatments of contemporary experience are
far from slapstick comedy. In Stepping Westward the Englishman, James Walker,
who becomes writer-in-residence at the "moral supermarket" of the
American university, begins with his own "decent modest radicalism"
and tries to extend himself to assimilate more of the modern world, looking for
"sense and design." The plot depends on Walker's public refusal to
sign an American loyalty oath, part of his English "faith in
unbelief," and the America he finds is one of "violence and
meaninglessness and anarchy." In The History Man Howard Kirk, seen far
less sympathetically than James Walker is, seeks "liberation" and "emancipation"
in the new university for himself and others, ignoring or condescending to his
old friend, Beamish, a rather bumbling locus of value in the novel, who claims
"there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country." In this
novel, written entirely in the rush of the present tense, Kirk chooses instead
to redevelop the town, to lie, to manipulate others in the name of the
"now" and the "new," and to ignore the voice of a young
English teacher who sees her function as simply reading and talking about books.
In both novels Bradbury's moral focus is clear and searching, although it
sometimes seems slightly provincial. He attacks the self-seeking, the
self-deceptive, and the meretricious, like a career academic named Froelich who
becomes chairman in Stepping Westward and Kirk himself in The History Man. Yet
some of Bradbury's work has more complexity and distance than outlining the
moral framework might suggest. Sometimes, as in The History Man,, which ends
with Kirk's wife deliberately pushing her arm through the window, an act of
self-destruction like that more ambivalently performed by Beamish at an earlier
party, or in a short story entitled "A Very Hospitable Person," the
satire seems brittle, almost cruel, in denying the central figures any humanity
or self-doubt. At other times, as in an excellent story called "A
Breakdown," about a student having a futile affair with a married man in
Chesterfield who runs off to Spain to punish herself, or as in Stepping
Westward, where James Walker recognizes that America has defeated him, that, in
spite of all his morality, he could not really handle his own freedom to define
himself, Bradbury's perspective is more sympathetic without diluting the moral
concern. A prefatory note to Rates of Exchange characterizes the novel as
"a paper fiction, offered for exchange" that illustrates "our
duty to lie together, in the cause, of course, of truth." Beneath its
comic texture of constant mutual misunderstanding and incompetence (sometimes
overdone), Bradbury sensitively questions the comfortable assumption of virtue
or truth in any of the various national, political, intellectual, or sexual
languages that form systems of human exchange.
Bradbury's
commitment to liberal humanism has always been tempered by a willingness to
test its continuing viability against various cultural, political, and economic
challenges. And nowhere is that willingness more clearly evident than in Doctor
Criminale. This witty fiction about fashionable literary theory, as well as the
fashion for literary theory, is also, appropriately enough, Bradbury's most
self-consciously intertextual novel to date, drawing on an impressive array of
literary precedents which include his own Rates of Exchange, Cuts, and two
Gravytrain television series as well as his friend David Lodge's Small World,
an updating of the campus novel for an age of the global campus. But in many
respects the work Doctor Criminale draws on most is F. Scott Fitzgerald's
"symbolist tragedy," The Great Gatsby, "about the struggle of
the symbolic imagination to exist in lowered historical time, and about that
symbol's inherent ambiguity, its wonder and its meretriciousness," as
Bradbury wrote in The Modern American Novel.
Doctor
Criminale is, of course, a comedy, not a tragedy, and its subject is theory's,
not the symbol's, essential ambiguity. Bradbury's Nick Carraway is the hapless,
anachronistlc Francis Jay, a verbal man and naive liberal humanist adrift in
the visual culture of entrepreneurial England. And his Gatsby is a man no less
able to inspire wonder in his admirers, the supercritic and celebrity thinker
Bazlo Criminale. Criminale, the "text" Jay sets out to decode, proves
a most elusive quarry. As mysterious as Eliot's famous MacCavity the Cat, he
seems less a person than a floating signifier who exists largely as a
collection of mutually exlusive interpretations, or signifieds. He is
alternately a philosopher who has declared the end of philosophy and a master
mystifier pulling books and articles out of his theoretical hat; perhaps a spy,
though maybe a double agent, an ardent Communist or, what is just as likely, an
ardent anti-Communist. Above all he is a version of the late Yale
deconstructionist, Paul de Man, who posthumously became the subject of intense
controversy following the discovery of articles he had written during the Nazi
occupation. Like de Man, Criminale seems to be a man at best
"flexible" and at worst "a moral disappointment."
Bradbury's jokey magical mystery tour of the political, economic, and literary
landscape at the end of the Cold War and on the eve of the European Community,
thus, does more than just delight; it also "problematizes" both
fashionable theory and old-fashioned liberal humanism by having each
"interrogate" the other. However, Doctor Criminale does more than
illuminate their relative strengths and weaknesses; in examining theory in a
specific historical context, Bradbury also examines many of the defining
features of the culture in which theory has been so ardently promoted and just
as strenuously resisted.
During the
late 1990s, Bradbury did not produce any novel-length fiction; rather, he
directed his attention toward drama, offering up plays (including Insider
Trading) and an adaptation of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm for the 1996
film directed by John Schlesinger. He also edited anthologies and wrote about
the subject he has experienced both from outside and inside, literature.
Published by James Gindin
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