Product Description

D.M. Thomas is one of the most controversial writers of our time - considered by some a major voice in contemporary fiction, by others a dubious literary 'impostor' who repeatedly appropriates female sexuality, the holocaust and the work of other writers for personal gain. Though best known for his best-selling novel The White Hotel, he has written twelve other novels and is also an acclaimed poet and translator of Russian literature. This, the first book-length study of his work, suggests that what troubles people about Thomas' work is the way it presents literature as a complex process of collaboration, translation, and improvisation. Central to this is Thomas' distinctive practice of uncannily impersonating the voices of other writers, thus destabilising conventional categories like authorship, originality and the self. Ranging across his work, from his early poetry to his most recent fiction, the book considers the influence of Russian literature on Thomas' work, his interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, and his commitment to finding suitable literary form to reflect the ways in which the uniquely violent, often nightmarish events of our times intersect with the desires and fantasies within us all

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1334942 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 102 pages

About the Author
Bran Nicol is a Lecturer in English at the University College Chichester. He is the author of Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Macmillan 1999) and numerous articles in journals on contemporary fiction and theory.

Customer Reviews

It was about time!
It was about time D. M. Thomas's novelistic output should be subject of a serious academic study. Bran Nichol has put forth a brief but incisive analysis of Thomas's novels grouping them according to a particular theme (Voices, The Art of Seduction, Acting Out, Dreamtime and Doubling Thomas). Of course The White Hotel stands out as Thomas's most accomplished novel and, I should add, as one of the most compelling novels that appeared in the 20th century. But, as this study shows, D. M. Thomas was not a one-hit wonder. Apart from The White Hotel, other novels deserve to be read and discussed, especially Eating Pavlova and Pictures at an Exhibition. Curiously, Thomas is at his best when he combines freudian psychoanalysis with the Holocaust.
Being a truly postmodernist writer, Thomas's has tackled themes like: authorship, fact vs fiction, the elusiveness of truth, originality and creativity, the individual and History....
In Bran Nichol's words " Studying his fiction and the response to it provides an insight into some of the dominant concerns of both theorists and practitioners of the English novel in the late twentieth century".