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Norfolk in 2013
Lawrence Norfolk (born 1963) is a British novelist known for historical works with complex plots and intricate detail.
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Lawrence Norfolk (born 1963) is a British novelist known for historical works with complex plots and intricate detail.
Though born in London, Norfolk lived in Iraq until 1967 and then in the West Country of England. He read English at King's College London and graduated in 1986. He worked briefly as a teacher and later as a freelance writer for reference book publishers.
In 1992 he won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, Lemprière's Dictionary, about events surrounding the publication, in 1788, of John Lemprière's Bibliotheca Classica on classical mythology and history. [1] The novel starts out as a detective story and mixes historical elements with steampunk-style fiction. [2] It imagines the writing of Lemprière's dictionary as tied to the founding of the British East India Company and the Siege of La Rochelle generations before; it also visits the Austro-Turkish War.
Norfolk based his second novel, The Pope's Rhinoceros, on the story of an actual animal; see Dürer's Rhinoceros. Themes in the work include the lost city of Vineta in the Baltic, the sack of Prato, and the Benin bronze-making culture on the river Niger.
The third novel, In the Shape of a Boar, juxtaposes the flight of a Bukovina Jew in World War II with the legend of Atalanta in Calydon.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Herbert George Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
William Tyndale was an English biblical scholar and linguist who became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in the years leading up to his execution. He is well known as a translator of the Bible into English, and was influenced by the works of prominent Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther.
Historical fiction is a literary genre in which a fictional plot takes place in the setting of particular real historical events. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video games and graphic novels.
Theodore Francis Powys – published as T. F. Powys – was a British novelist and short-story writer. He is best remembered for his allegorical novel Mr. Weston's Good Wine (1927), where Weston the wine merchant is evidently God. Powys was influenced by the Bible, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift and other writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as later writers such as Thomas Hardy and Friedrich Nietzsche.
British literature is literature from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. This article covers British literature in the English language. Anglo-Saxon literature is included, and there is some discussion of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature, where literature in these languages relate to the early development of the English language and literature. There is also some brief discussion of major figures who wrote in Scots, but the main discussion is in the various Scottish literature articles.
Digression is a section of a composition or speech that marks a temporary shift of subject; the digression ends when the writer or speaker returns to the main topic. Digressions can be used intentionally as a stylistic or rhetorical device.
Sir John Fielding was a notable English magistrate and social reformer of the 18th century. He was the younger half-brother of novelist, playwright and chief magistrate Henry Fielding. Despite being blinded in an accident at the age of 19, John set up his own business and, in his spare time, studied law with Henry.
Jack Lindsay was an Australian-born writer, who from 1926 lived in the United Kingdom, initially in Essex. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman Lindsay and brother of author Philip Lindsay.
John Lemprière was an English classical scholar, lexicographer, theologian, teacher and headmaster.
Adventure fiction is a type of fiction that usually presents danger, or gives the reader a sense of excitement. Some adventure fiction also satisfies the literary definition of romance fiction.
The Bibliotheca Classica, or Classical Dictionary containing a full Account of all the Proper Names mentioned in Ancient Authors, is the best-known work of John Lemprière, an English classical scholar. Edited by various later scholars, the dictionary long remained a readable if not absolutely trustworthy reference book in mythology and classical history. Lemprière wished "to give the most accurate and satisfactory account of all the proper names which occur in reading the Classics, and by a judicious collection of anecdotes and historical facts to draw a picture of ancient times, not less instructive than entertaining."
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
English literature is literature written in the English language from the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. The English language has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English, and has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure in the development of the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The English word to describe such a work derives from the Italian: novella for "new", "news", or "short story ", itself from the Latin: novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel.
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians and is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
The novel in Scotland includes all long prose fiction published in Scotland and by Scottish authors since the development of the literary format in the eighteenth century. The novel was soon a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle mean that he is often seen as Scotland's first novelist. Other Scots who contributed to the development of the novel in the eighteenth century include Henry Mackenzie and John Moore.
Nautical fiction, frequently also naval fiction, sea fiction, naval adventure fiction or maritime fiction, is a genre of literature with a setting on or near the sea, that focuses on the human relationship to the sea and sea voyages and highlights nautical culture in these environments. The settings of nautical fiction vary greatly, including merchant ships, liners, naval ships, fishing vessels, life boats, etc., along with sea ports and fishing villages. When describing nautical fiction, scholars most frequently refer to novels, novellas, and short stories, sometimes under the name of sea novels or sea stories. These works are sometimes adapted for the theatre, film and television.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
More playful and self-reflexive [...], Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary investigates the eighteenth century as the seedbed of nineteenth-century capitalist economies and the will to power that inherently occupies them.
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