pure moralist, but a piquant blend of all three. The humour is the sharper for the moral seriousness with which it runs in harness.Jansen grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. In her mid-twenties she moved to London where she spent ten years before going to America. She lives in California with her husband, professor of wild-land sciences.Jansen created a brilliant novel Mary Maddison (1991) about a tragic fate of Elizabeth and her little daughter Mary after the death of Mary s grandparents when her uncle Joseph inherited everything and drove Elizabeth and her daughter off the house. Look here, Elizabeth, I can lend you a few pounds to help you get started and you can pay me back when you get a job. To which Elizabeth replied: You can keep your conscience money. Forced to leave the family home they face the deprivation of one of Newcastle s poorer areas. Elizabeth, tired and exhausted by daily work died of diabetes the day before Mary s thirteen birthday and Mary s wanderings in life began. Mary becomes a factory worker where she meets Joe Cowley. When she gets pregnant Joe refuses to bear any responsibility for the child. Mary is thrown back on her own resources once more.Brookfield (b.1960), an Oxford graduate with a First Class Honour degree lives with her family in South London. Her best novels are Alice Alone, A Cast of Smiles, Walls of Glass, The Lover, A family Man. Her latest novel Sisters and Husbands was published in 2002. It sa breathtaking story about two sisters - Anna Lawrence, with a successful career in broadcasting and marriage to David, a wealthy man with a luxurious country home, and Becky, who lives in a dilapidated house in South London, and has to contend with her husband Joe who is struggling to become the chef, and Jenny, his eleven-year-old daughter of the first marriage.Rutherfurd (b.1948) was born in Salisbury, and educated in Wiltshire and Cambridge. For some time he lived in New York, but returned to his roots to research and write the novel Sarum, based on the history of his native town Salisbury. His second novel Russka tells the history of Russia from the Cossack horsemen of the steppes to the events of the Bolshevik revolution. His newer work is the historical novel London (1997) - a saga about the most magnificent city in the world from the days of the Romans through sixteen centuries to the Victorian time and the end of the twentieth century. The last chapter 21 is dated by 1997. Rutherfurd s latest novels, published in 2005, include The Princess of Ireland and The Rebels of Ireland.Taylor (b.1965) has written over twenty books, mainly crime novels and thrillers. They include the series featuring William Dougal, a detective who occasionally commits murders as well as solves them; an espionage trilogy whose chronology stretches from the 1930s to the 1980s; psychological thrillers; and books for younger readers. His first novel Caroline Minuscule appeared in 1982. Then came the psychological thriller The Office of the Dead (2000), (the third volume of the Roth Trilogy), and Death s Own Door (2001), the sixth novel in the Lydmouth Series, which is set about fifty years ago on the Anglo-Welsh borders. His latest novels also include The Judgment of Strangers (1998), Where Roses Fade (2000), Requiem For an Angel (2002), The American Boy (2003) and Call the Dying (2004). Wilson (b.1939) has worked briefly as a teacher, and more successfully as an editor of non-fiction books. She has written history books for children and is interested in history, particularly of the recent past, painting and sculpture, uninhabited buildings, underground structures, cemeteries and time capsules. She has published the psychological crime novels, A Little Death and Dying Voices, and My Best Friend, which was published in 2001.are but just a few more names of masters of pen of the newest period.
Comprehension Questions and Tasks
1. Speak on the life and creative activity Agatha Christie. Describe the central figures of Agatha Christie s novels. Speak upon the most significant books of the writer.
. Give a brief account of the life and the literary work of Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, AN Wilson, Jennifer Johnston, Sheila Jansen, Edward Rutherfurd, Amanda Brookfield. What joins these authors? br/>
AMERICAN LITERATURE
5. AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE FIRST HALF AND THE MIDDLE OF THE XX-TH CENTURY. NEW WAVES
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