Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction After 1945

The author is dead; long live the author. In a time when discourses, words and structures determine the discussion about literary texts, paradoxically, the figure of the artist looms large in novels, short stories, movies and plays. In a "post-Barthesian age" (Scherzinger) the figure of the artist is ascribed more and more significance. While the portraits of the artist as a young man are well-researched and documented, female artist figures in literature(s) in English are still more or less neglected. This volume of anglistik & englischunterricht attempts to fill the gap. The focus of the essays lies, firstly, on the (de-)constructions of gender, secondly, the complex self-reflexive functions of the artist figures and, thirdly, on the negotiations of cultural faultlines.