Julian Barnes is a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that situates his work in terms of fabulation and memory, irony and comedy.
It pursues a broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career, but along the way it also shows how certain key thematic preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory). Chapters provide detailed reading of each major publication in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes’s fiction, including art, authorship, history, love and religion. Lucidly written, and also satisfyingly comprehensive, this work analyzes the "canonical" Barnes texts, and includes brief but illuminating discussion of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of fictions of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George also benefits from archival research into his unpublished materials.
The book will be a useful resource for scholars, graduates and undergraduates working in the field of contemporary literature.
