Contemporary Theatre (Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies : No. 4)

A professor of English literature and American studies who has published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of moral responsibility. show more The targets of Bradbury's satires include intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness. His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). This last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and Cuts (1987). (Bowker Author Biography) Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist, & satirist. His many books include "Rates of Exchange", which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, & "The Modern American Novel". (Publisher Provided) show less

John Russell Brown is Honorary Visiting Professor at University College London in the UK, and has held chairs of English and Theatre in both England and the USA.He has directed renaissance and contemporary plays in student and professional theatres for twelve years he was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre in London, UK. He is show more series editor for The Shakespeare Handbooks and Theatres of the World, as well as editing and contributing to the Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Among his previous publications are Shakespeare: The Tragedies, Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event and Shakespeare Dancing, all published by Palgrave Macmillan. show less