Henry Green

Henry Green: Class Style and the Everyday offers a critical prism through which Green's fiction-from his earliest published short stories as an Eton schoolboy through to his last dialogic novels of the 195s-can be seen as a coherent subtle and humorous critique of the tension between class style and realism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going critical recognition that Green's work is central to the development ofthe novel from the twenties to the fifties acting as a vital bridge between late modernist inter-war post-war and postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of theeveryday. Consequently each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy of the writing whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended purposefully ambiguous nature of its symbols; the shifting cinematic nature of Green's prose style; the sensitive but resolutely unsentimental depictions of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period; the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life; or the ways in which moments orevents are rapidly subsumed back into the flux of the everyday their impact left uncertain. Critics have historically offered up singular readings of Green's work or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works particularly those of the 194s. Green's writing is undoubtedlypoetic and extraordinary but this book also pays attention to the clichéd meta-textual and uneventful aspects of his fiction.