Bøker av John Thieme

This collection brings together a series of individual poems, which for the most part are not closely connected, and 'Massiah', a sequence of verse narratives told in a Guyanese barber shop, where there is continuity from one to the next. Some of the individual poems were written in response to invitations for submissions on particular subjects. These include three on war and peace and five short pieces written during the time of the pandemic, but the remainder are more scattered in theme, tone and form. The spark for most of these came, uninvited and unsolicited, into my mind, demanding to be developed into a finished piece for dissemination on page or screen. However, when I began to gather these poems together for this volume, I became aware of two recurring concerns. (John Thieme)

Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet.Focusing on fiction set in the 'long present' - a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present - Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat.Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

The Book of Francis Barber is the fictional autobiography of Dr Samuel Johnson's Jamaican-born manservant, whom Johnson made his residuary legatee. Francis believes his new-found wealth will propel him into the upper echelons of English society, but ensuing events gradually show him that "class" is not easily acquired. As his story unfolds, it becomes clear that his racial origins are an obstacle to his ambitions. The novel is both a major new contribution to eighteenth-century historical fiction, and a warm portrait of its sympathetic narrator's journey towards self-realization.

John Thieme provides a comprehensive study of Derek Walcott's writing from its beginning in the 1940s to his most recent work. Walcott's poetry and drama are set against the background of various contexts and intertexts - Caribbean, European and other - which have shaped him as a writer.

R.K. Narayan's reputation as one of the founding figures of Indian writing in English is re-examined in this comprehensive study of his fiction, which offers detailed readings of all his novels. Arguing against views that have seen Narayan as a chronicler of "e;authentic"e; Indianness, John Thieme locates his fiction in terms of its specific South Indian contexts and cultural geography and its non-Indian intertexts. The study also considers the effect that Narayan's writing for overseas publication had on novels such as Swami and Friends, The Guide and The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Narayan's imaginary small town of Malgudi has often been seen as a metonym for India. Thieme draws on recent thinking about the ways in which place and space are constructed to demonstrate that Malgudi is always a fractured and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquitousness and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. The study also shows that Malgudi is seen from varying angles of vision and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan's career. As well as offering fresh insights into the influences that went into the making of Narayan's fiction, this is the most wide-ranging and authoritative guide to his novels to have appeared to date. It provides a unique account of his development as a writer.