Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Bainbridge, Beryl (Vol. 131) - David Punter (essay date 1985)

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David Punter (essay date 1985)

SOURCE: “Beryl Bainbridge: The New Psychopathia,” in The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 59-77.

[In the following essay, Punter examines the presentation of psychological trauma in Bainbridge's novels and the struggles among her characters, particularly those who are female, to deal with both familial and cultural forces of alienation, deprivation, abuse, and rejection.]

Beryl Bainbridge has acted Krafft-Ebing in response to the self-aware Freudianism of many of her fellow-writers; where Lessing, Carter, Barth, have paraded analysis, she has presented herself during the 1970s as a meticulous chronicler of ‘everyday’ events, who would raise an innocent eyebrow at any mention of psychosis, whether attached to writer, character, reader or text.¹ The calamities she depicts are, so the surrounding authorial fiction goes, conventionally implicit in...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Colin Thubron (review date 23 September 1984)
   2. David Punter (essay date 1985)
   3. Suzon Forscey (review date 12 January 1986)
   4. Richard Ingrams (review date 22 August 1987)
   5. Nicci Gerrard (review date 5 January 1990)
   6. Francine Prose (review date July 1991)
   7. Nancy Engbretsen Schaumburger (review date Fall 1991)
   8. Francis Spufford (review date 20 December 1991)
   9. Andro Linklater (review date 4 January 1992)
   10. Michael Cross (review date 11 April 1992)
   11. Elisabeth Wennö (essay date 1993)
   12. Dennis Drabelle (review date 10 April 1994)
   13. Gary Krist (review date 17 April 1994)
   14. Michael D. Schaffer (review date 9 June 1994)
   15. Amy Gamerman (review date 13 July 1994)
   16. Judith Freeman (review date 7 August 1994)
   17. Alex Clark (review date 6 January 1995)
   18. Judy Cooke (review date 13 September 1996)
   19. Jane Gardam (review date 14 September 1996)
   20. John Updike (review date 14 October 1996)
   21. Karen Heller (review date 22 November 1996)
   22. Susan Heeger (review date 24 November 1996)
   23. Kate Saunders (review date 1 May 1998)
   24. Daniel M. Murtaugh (review date 6 November 1998)
   25. Francine Prose (review date 29 November 1998)
   26. John Gallagher (review date 7 December 1998)
   27. Gail Pool (review date January 1999)
   28. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 5 August 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright