About the Editors
British and Irish Fiction
Brian W. Shaffer is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Faculty Development at Rhodes College, USA and General Editor for The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. He is the author of Reading the Novel in English, 1950-2000 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (1998), and The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of Civilization (1993). He is the co-editor of Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008) and Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer” (2002) and the editor of A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).
World Fiction
John Clement Ball is Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, specializing in Postcolonial and Canadian fiction. He is the author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003). Since 1996 he has served as editor or co-editor of the scholarly journal Studies in Canadian Literature.
American Fiction
Patrick O’Donnell is Professor of English and American Literature at Michigan State University, USA, where he served as department chair from 1997-2007. He has written and edited a number of books and collections on contemporary American fiction and film, including The American Novel Now (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia in Contemporary U.S. Fiction (2000), Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992), New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 (ed, 1991), and Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction (1986). He is an associate editor of The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), and former editor of Modern Fiction Studies.
David W. Madden is Professor of American and Irish literatures at California State University, Sacramento, USA, where he served twelve years as his department’s graduate coordinator and has won awards for outstanding teaching and scholarly achievement. He has written numerous articles and reviews and guest-edited two issues of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. He is author of Understanding Paul West (1993) and editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Berger (1995).
Justus Nieland is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has written widely in the fields of modernism, the avant-garde and film studies. He is the author of Feeling Modern: the Eccentricities of Public Life (2008) and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2009). His recent work has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and A Companion to the Modern American Novel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).