Stephen King’s novel The Green Mile (1996) once fascinated my teenage consciousness. It had everything a hungry imagination craved: a parable-narrative, the dark atmosphere of the death-row unit at the Cold Mountain Penitentiary, an interesting temporal and geographical context Typical, or archetypal, triad of heroes (there is analogy with the Bible and three crucified people…
Category: novels
Birth of the British Novel
Author of the documentary Birth of the British Novel (2011) – BBC Four – Henry Hitchings explores the lives and works of Britain’s radical and pioneering 18th-century novelists who, in just 80 years, established all the literary genres we recognise today. It was a golden age of creativity led by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry…

