What Decides Literary Genre?

This week, I heard someone reading a poem that sounded to me exactly like prose.  Now, I’ve always been bad at understanding or passing any meaningful comment on poetry (it’s my blind spot) but the more I listened the more I realised I was responding to the poem exactly as if it were a shortContinue reading “What Decides Literary Genre?”

Thinking About The Identity Plot

On a long journey yesterday, I finished listening to Amy Hungerford’s Lectures on the American Novel Since 1945, which – by the way – I thoroughly recommend to any one interested in modern literature.  Central to her argument is that old patterns in literary novels, such as the ‘Marriage Plot’ of Victorian novels, have more recentlyContinue reading “Thinking About The Identity Plot”