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Description

This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language.

  • Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars
  • Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field
  • Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works
  • Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile
About the Author

Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty Development at Rhodes College, USA. His previous publications include Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998), and Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2006). He is the co-editor of Approaches to Teaching Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer" (2002), and Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008), and the editor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000 (Wiley-Blackwell 2005).

Patrick O'Donnell is Professor of English and American Literature at Michigan State University, USA. His previous works include Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (2000), and The American Novel Now (Wiley-Blackwell 2010).

David W. Madden is Professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, USA. He is the author of Understanding Paul West (1993) and the editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (1995).

Justus Nieland is Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has written many papers in the fields of modernism, the avant-garde, and film studies, and is author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008).

John Clement Ball is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, specializing in postcolonial and Canadian fiction. He is the author of Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003) and Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004).