Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Description

A multiple award-winning author, Sarah Waters is one of the most critically and commercially successful novelists writing today. In such novels as Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and The Night Watch, her writing has played compellingly with popular and generic forms and narrative techniques and covered a number of important contemporary themes. This critical guide is the first book to offer a wide range of current critical perspectives on Waters' work. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars the book explores issues such as gender, sexuality, class, time and space in Waters' fiction, as well as her appropriation of a range of genres from the historical and neo-victorian novel to the gothic. The book also includes a new interview with Waters herself, a timeline of her life, chapter summaries and guides to further reading, making this an essential guide to the work of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

Kaye Mitchell is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of A. L Kennedy (Palgrave 2007) and Intention and Text (Continuum, 2008).

With a foreword by Andrew Davies, a useful assessment of Waters' popular and critical reception to date, and an interview with the author herself, this volume is a timely addition to the growing body of criticism on the award-winning author -- Claire O'Callaghan, Brunel University, UK * Contemporary Women's Writing, vol. 8 no. 3 *