Arnold Bennett summary

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Arnold Bennett.

Arnold Bennett, (born May 27, 1867, Hanley, Staffordshire, Eng.—died March 27, 1931, London), English novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist. His major works, inspired by Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, form an important link between the English novel and the mainstream of European realism. He is best known for his highly detailed novels of the “Five Towns”—the Potteries in his native Staffordshire—which are the setting of Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and the three novels that make up The Clayhanger Family (1925). He was also a well-known critic.

literary criticism Summary

Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often

novel Summary

Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an