Adrian Mole’s Very English Portrait of Male Anguish
In Sue Townsend’s hands, comedy doesn’t soften despair; it sharpens it. Her creation, Adrian Mole, is a most perfectly flawed portrait of loneliness and failure.
British literature
Even Meryl Streep Can’t Save ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ from Postmodern Pretense
The French Lieutenant’s Woman has not aged well, and this has to do with the failure of postmodernism and poststructuralism to contribute anything useful to popular culture.