KINGSLEY AMIS -he is best known for his first novel Lucky Jim.

In this book Amis deals with the situation at a small university, for which he was able to use his own experiences as a university teacher at Swansea, Wales. The main character Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history. He tries to keep his post at the university, but everything turns out wrong. Finally, during his own lecture, he parodies all the eminent professors at the university. He is dismissed, but wins a beautiful girl Christine, and finds employment in the house of a rich aristocrat. In Lucky Jim, Amis mocks the pseudo-scholarly society, snobbery, and hypocrisy. In his next novel, The Uncertain Feeling, he more or less follows the same mode, he presents another anti-hero, John Lewis, but without such brilliant comic effects of his first novel. His anger gradually changes into a good-natured smile in his later novels, eg. I Like It Here, Take a Girl Like You, or One Fat Englishman, where he depicts the love affairs of a conceited, snobbish professor of forty. In his later novels Amis made attempts at various genres from satirical comedies to horrors, thrillers, spynovels and detective stories. His novels of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s include: I want it now, The green man, Girl, 20, Ending up, The Alternation, Jakes Thing, Stanley and the Women. In Jakes Thing Amis returned to his earlier contemporary novels with satirical approach. His biting wit and irony is directed against contemporary sex therapy and other fashionable methods, distorting the natural relationship between the sexes. At the end of the novel Jake learns that his loss of libido may have been rather psychical in origin after all. JULIAN BARNES His novels reflect his passion for French literature and preoccupation with marriage and fidelity, eg. In his novel Before She Met Me. His playful experimental novel, Flauberts Parrot combines fiction, literary criticism and Flauberts biography. The narrator, a retired general practitioner and widower, is obsessed with the personality of a French novelist Gustav Flaubert and wants to know everything about him, even such details as the origin of a stuffed parrot in Flauberts house or the colour of Emma Bovarys eyes.

MALCOLN BRADBURY He is a professor of American Literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He is very familiar with the atmosphere of a provincial university which is often a setting for his witty satirical novels, eg. Eating People is Wrong. In Stepping Westward he confronts a British liberal, James Walker, with an American provincial university. The History Man is situated in the era of radical students upheavals in the late 1960s. In Rates of Exchange, an English linguist is on a two-week in central Europe. In 1976 Bradbury published a collection of shortstories and parodies of well known contemporary British writers, Who Do You Think You Are. He is also an eminent critic

DAVID LODGE Became popular with his satirical campus novels The British Museum is Falling Down, Changing Places, confronting the situation of a British and an American university, and its sequel Small World. He is also a leading literary theorist. The radically changed situation of women in society, the appearance of womans presses, and the creation of departments of womens studies at some universities to some extent constituted a separate phenomenon. Certainly one of the most striking features of contemporary fiction has been the large number of talented women novelists.

EVELYN WAUGH

he belonged to the Catholic writers, defending traditional moral values. In his satires, he was concerned with criticizing the English society, snobbery and dullness. His novels Decline and Fall, is an extremely witty satirical attack against the English public school system. Vile Bodies mocks contemporary mores. Waughs stay in Africa is reflected in his novels Black Mischief and A Handful of War II: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, with the central character being a disillusioned romantic.

PETER ACKROYD Is a famous contemporary novelist, poet, and literary critic who wrote several brilliant biographies of English writers (Elliot, Dickens, Blake). In his novels, he uses the devices of popular reading- he depicts various crimes, mysteries and horrors, usually set in London. He often presents historical events and persons and combines the facts with the fictional. His novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is written in the form of a fictitious diary, covering the last months of Wildes life in Paris in 1900. It is primarily the work of imagination about the relationship between the artist and the world and about the difference between the fictional and historical truth. In his next novel, Hawksmoor Ackroyd plays elaborate games with history and imagination again. The novel deals with the series of murders in contemporary London strangely connected with an architect of churches from the 18th century. It radically subverts the conventions of historical fiction. The Great Fire in London, Chatterton, English Music, The House of Doctor Dee, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

ANGELA CARTER wrote artificial novels and short- stories, inspired by Gothic romances, in which she mixed he fantastic and the real. Her baroque language is full of sensual complicated images and poetic metaphors. In her collection of short- stories, Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, she rewrites old fairy- tales and myths from the feminist perspective. The novels by A. Carter show her preoccupation with the frankly erotic, with the sadistic linking of sex and pain, and with the struggles for master between the powerful individual and the vulnerable. Her frequent motif is the erotic initiation of a young innocent girl in the nightmarish world. Some if Carters famous novels are: The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Passion of New Eve, both set in future, and Nights at Circus she also published many short-stories, several books for children and feminist study The Sadeian Woman

GRAHAM GREENE is one of the best known modern novelists and his works have been translated into many languages. Though he published his first works before and during World War II, he became more prolific in the post-war period. He worked as an editor in The Times and in the Foreign Office. This experience helped him to create the convincing settings in his novels. As a diplomat, he travelled a great deal, so afterwards he placed his stories in many foreign countries. He converted to Roman Catholicism which undoubtedly influenced his literary work. Greene himself divides his books into entertainments and serious novels, even if the borderline between those two types is sometimes uncertain. Among the former, there are his detective stories or thrillers such as The Confidential Agent, The Ministry of Fear, or Our Man in Havana.

From his serious novels we can mention Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, A Burn-out Case, The Comedians, Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or the Bomb Party and Monsignor Quixote. The Power and the Glory is often considered to be the greatest novel. It deals with the fate of a Roman Catholic priest who is pursued by the police. He does not abandon his faith and suffers martyrdom in the end. The main character in The Heart of the Matter is Scobie, a police major in a colony in Africa. He is a good Catholic and the sense of pity he feels towards people is deeper than his sense of duty. His faith in people makes him isolated in the contemporary world. He prefers to commit suicide rather than to continue to hurt other people. In the Quiet American, Greene criticizes the intrigues of American policy during the war in Vietnam. The story is told by Fowler, an English reporter. He has been living with a Vietnamese girl who gives him comfort and peace. He refuses to be involved in the political conflicts but is forced to it. The Quiet American, Alden Pyle, a university graduate, comes to Vietnam on a special mission. Fowler becomes a witness to the evil resulting from Pyles naivity, blind self-confidence, and lack of experience. Fowler realizes how dangerous ignorance is in politics, and makes arrangements for Pyle to be murdered. The setting of A Burn-out-Case is a Central African jungle, while the novel Comedians takes place in Haiti during the dictatorship of President Duvalier. In his late novel Monsignor Quixote, a Catholic monsignor travels over Spain with the Communist chairman of the town El Toboloso. Greene confronts two people with totally different attitudes to the world who are able to understand and tolerate each other at the end. The central questions in Greenes books are usually problems of evil of broader dimensions, as Nazism in Ministry of Fear or the colonial war in The Quiet American. His characters are complicated anti-heroes, wavering uncertainly between passive hesitation and their sense of duty, they are both just and unhappy. In the end their positive human qualities prevail when tested in extreme situations. Greenes works reflect political and moral relativism, full of constant doubts about right and wrong. Greene is also the author of several plays, books for children and short-stories, eg. Twenty-one Stories, A Sense of Reality. His Collected Essays were published in 1969.