-

 


Fowles's fiction was never merely dry, intellectual sparring. He was a writer possessed of an expansive imagination, whose gifts as a storyteller meant that his dramas were played out beyond the conflicts of the inner self. His narrative genius led to three of his novels being filmed, two of them to critical acclaim.

John Fowles, the British writer whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations of his work.

In 'The French Lieutenant's Woman," for instance, he combined the story and melodrama of a 19th-century Victorian novel with the sensibility of a 20th- century postmodern narrator, offering his readers two alternative endings from which to choose, and at one point boldly inserting himself into the book as a character who accompanies its hero on a train to London.

Building Great Collections, One Fine Book at a Time

Visit us at BlindHorseBooks.com

#JohnFowles #TodayInLiteraryHistory #OnThisDay

Adapted from NYT Obituary, Nov 7, 2005

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
  Henrik Johan Ibsen 20 March 1828 – 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements. He is w...
Read more
-
Image
    Remembering C. S. Lewis on his birthday. Did you know ….. Lewis destroyed the first version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when his friends criticized it; he then rewrote it from scratch. Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis' memoir Surprised by Joy, he was baptized in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim. Clive Staples Lewis was a British novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lec...
Read more
-
Image
  Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death at 25 from tuberculosis. In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which would be major influences on his own style. Beardsley's first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), which he illustrated for the publishing house J. M. Dent and Company. Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grote...
Read more