Biography EssayA novelist who writes for a living, says author John Fowles, is an altogether different creature from one whose art is his life. The latter, a "dynamic artist," seeks "to form new image...
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John Fowles (born 1926) was an award-winning post-World War II novelist of major importance. While his works are reflective of literary tradition reaching back to Greek philosophy and Celtic romance, ...
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[This entry was updated by Thomas C. Foster (University of Michigan--—Flint) with the entry by Ellen Pifer (University of Delaware) in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume...
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John Fowles has consistently distanced himself from the middle-class English society that was his familial lot and a source of much resentment toward his father. Now living in a sort of self-imposed e...
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“I've always wanted to write,” declared John Fowles in a 1964 essay, “(in this order) poems, philosophy, and only then novels” (published in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writin...
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Critical Essay by Dwight Eddins
One of the central concerns of metafiction from Borges to Barth—or perhaps, more accurately, from Laurence Sterne to Barth—has been the reanimation and ex...
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Butler is an educator, editor, and critic. In the essay below, he discusses Fowles's focus on freedom, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, and intertextuality in his novels.
Fowles is an engima ...
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In the following excerpt, Tarbox examines the underlying theme of Fowles's novels, analyzing the trials that his protagonists undergo in order to achieve self-realization and authenticity.
In m...
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In the excerpt below, Onega examines the major themes and structural devices of Fowles's novels.
[The different trends at work in the contemporary English novel from the fifties onwards involve...
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Below, Broich analyzes "The Enigma " in the context of the mimetic and aesthetic traditions of British short fiction, acknowledging the story's seminal influence on the postmodern...
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In the following essay, Sofinskaya considers the interaction among mysterious, symbolic aspects and ordinary, realistic events in Fowles's short fiction, assessing his contribution to the devel...
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John Fowles
John Fowles
