Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisDon Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Table of ContentsBiographical OutlinePrologue1. For the Hell of It: Nil Nil (1993)2. Which Man I Am: God's Gift to Women (1997)3. Not Your Name, Not Mine: The Eyes (1999)4. Shrewd Obliquity of Speech: Landing Light (2003)5. Breath, You Invisible Poem: Orpheus (2006)6. None of This Matters: Rain (2009)Coda: 40 Sonnets (2015) and Zonal (2020)

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Book SynopsisThis invigorating volume explores the literary worlds inhabited by the pioneering Irish author George Moore (1852–1933). With an eye to Moore’s innovative embrace of visual art, feminism and literary history, and in the spirit of his feisty resistance to ‘orthodoxy’, it investigates his influences and inventive strategies in novel, short story and memoir. Amongst the names emerging from the disparate spheres of impressionism, literary coteries, the paratextual and the music world are those of Manet, Mallarmé, Wilde, Héloïse, Elgar and Bourdieu, all with Moorian links. Contested depictions of religion and nationalism simmer; France and French influences encompass fin-de-siècle stories and medieval texts; epistolary details evidence vital parental support; contemporary authors write back to Moore. These voyages of discovery enter the fields of feminist scholarship and the New Woman, life writing and letters, fin-de-siècle aesthetics, intersections between art, music and literature, and literary transitions from Victorian to Modern. Valuably, the authors suggest numerous opportunities for additional research in these areas, as well as within Moore studies. This collection, with contributions from an international set of established and new scholars, delivers fresh and original findings as it builds on the substantial and ever-growing corpus of Moore studies.Trade Review‘This collection conveys the spirit of an active scholarly community. Moore’s relationship with women excites a frenzy of attention – a complex case, and interesting to clarify. Often, a contributor spots George Moore in a contemporary’s writing, or notices how a motif from Moore is countered in a work by a contemporary. Overall, a fascinating fusion of scholarship, truly international.’ Adrian Frazier, Professor Emeritus at the University of Galway and author of George Moore: 1852–1933Table of ContentsIntroduction I. Artistic Influences and Approaches The French Artist as Father, Muse and Rival in Memoirs of My Dead Life Ann Heilmann “Superfluous” Irish Gentry: Moore and Turgenev Márta Pellérdi Literature, Music, Art and the Salon: George Moore’s Perennial Courting of Creativity Mary Pierse The Prefaces of George Moore: Enigma Variations Kathi R. Griffin II. Cherchez la Femme? Sphinxes without Secrets: Oscar Wilde, George Moore and the Woman Question Nathalie Saudo Welby George Moore, London ‘Literary Ladies’, Networks, and New Artistic Impulses Kathryn Laing The “Puzzle” of Gladys Parrish’s Carfrae’s Comedy and George Moore’s Evelyn Innes: Some Intertextual Connections Brendan Fleming III. France: Fiction and Letters Between France and Ireland: How George Moore and Helen Waddell used Héloïse and Abélard George Hughes A French Train of Thought in ‘Two Men, a Railway Story’: From Impressionism to Expressionism Michel Brunet Epistolary Truths: ‘How one runs to ones mother when in trouble’ Maggie Breslin IV. Politics, Religion and Nationality George Moore and Decadent Catholicism: a Case Study of Evelyn Innes Claire Masurel Murray George Moore’s Irish Catholic Characters With ‘English’ Names David Clare Appropriating George Moore: J.O. Hannay’s The Seething Pot Conor Montague

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Book SynopsisThis book by Rodge Glass, the award-winning novelist, short story writer and biographer, is the first ever detailed assessment of Michel Faber’s life and work across genre and form. It draws on intimate, wide-ranging interviews with the author over a two-year period and investigates previously unexplored archival material, from the Canongate Books records to Faber’s own personal archive, to bring fresh perspectives to light. Glass presents detailed interrogations of unpublished texts, including a novel, A Photograph of Jesus, as well as providing deep dives into Faber’s most celebrated works such as Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White. Known for his hybrid creative-critical approach, Glass uses Faber’s interest in generosity and compassion in writing as a focus for this study. Grouping his works by ‘World’, the book ranges across poetry, short stories, novels and novellas to make an argument for Faber as a writer who has consistently sought to explore narrow emotional territory, that of the human instinct to seek connection with others, even if genuine connection seems unlikely or impossible. Glass draws on individual case studies across Faber’s hugely diverse body of work in a way that will be both- interesting for fans and informative for students of Faber’s writing.Table of ContentsBiographical Outline Introduction Faber’s World of the Short Story Faber’s World of The Novella (or, The Medium-Sized Story) Faber’s World of the Novel Faber’s World of The Crimson Petal Faber’s World of Verse Faber, Out of Time Select Bibliography: Books, Essays, Interviews, Criticism

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Book SynopsisH.G. Wells has been branded as a novelist who betrayed his vocation. But Wells saw himself as what we would today call a public intellectual. How credible is this claim? And what happens when we look at him in this way? So typecast has Wells’s reputation become that neither of these questions has been previously asked, but when we look at Wells as a thinker we find a whole new quality to his later works, which have invariably been dismissed by literary scholars as of low quality or even not worth reading. In particular, Wells’s prescience as a prophet of our current environmental problems stands out - for example, he foresaw anthropogenic climate change as early as 1931. Popular conceptions of Wells as racist, imperialist and eugenicist are also challenged. What emerges is a new perspective on a significant public intellectual and- pioneering prophet of the twenty-first century.Table of ContentsForeword by Patrick Parrinder Introduction: H.G. Wells, the Disorderly Prophet Wells as Some Sort of Philosopher Days of Future Past: Wells as Historian and Prophet Should Wells Be Cancelled? The Dream of Cosmopolis: Wells and Politics God, Science and Mr Wells Wells and Human Ecology Appendix I: The Philosophical Works of H.G. Wells Appendix II: The Prophecies of H.G. Wells

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Book SynopsisThe modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Pure Good of Theory Thomas Gould and Ian Tan I Reading Stevens Theorizing Almost Successfully Lisa M. Steinman The Reader In/Of Stevens Ariane Mildenberg The Event in Stevens as Poetic Justification: Alain Badiou, Poetic Performativity and the Implied Reader Ian Tan II Theory and Form Stevens’s Queer Ecologies Bart Eeckhout The Pursuits of Philosophy and the Sounds of Poetry: Stevens and Heidegger Wit Pietrzak Stevens, Adorno and the Worldly Poetics of Lyric Unworlding Zachary Tavlin III Experience and Affect Wider Than the Sky: Stevens, Consciousness and the Incipient Cosmos Kathryn Mudgett What Stevens’s Poetry can offer to Theorists of Consciousness Charles Altieri ‘Emotionally We Arrive all the Time’: Stevens and Affect Theory Marta Figlerowicz IV Theology and Post-Theology From Philosophy to Theology: Stevens’s Angel and the Real Stephen Sicari Two Cathedrals: Stevens and George Santayana's Sonnet Exchange Kelly MacPhail The The: Stevens’s Neighborliness Thomas Gould V Postures and Dispositions ‘A war between the mind and the sky’: Fictions, Fools, and the Consequences of Empire Johanna Skibsrud Damned Universal Cock: Stevens’s Ecstatic Present Rachel Trousdale A Collect of Style Krzysztof Ziarek

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Book SynopsisOurs is an age of precarity, with fear and anxiety coming to define the twenty-first century; politically, economically and socially, neoliberal systems and policies dominate globally. Traditional frameworks of protection have consequently been dismantled, and existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals. Against this backdrop, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode to address this age of precarity. Examining twenty-first-century Gothic fiction's engagement with the most pressing issues of our age, the readers of this volume will consider the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s, and observe a modern-day Frankenstein's creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War. They will also discover vampires (representatives of a voracious, toxic economic model) in an alternate Mexico City, encounter a nomadic group traversing the only remaining wilderness in a near-future North America devastated as a result of the climate crisis, and be haunted by a spectral migrant who died in their efforts to flee political oppression in Vietnam.

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Book SynopsisThis is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolutionary Russia to his final fate as a victim of Stalinism.The myth has grown up that Mandelstam was a gloomy, miserable figure; Dutli deconstructs this, stressing Mandelstam's enjoyment of life. There are several underlying themes here. One is Mandelstam's Jewish background in pre-1914 Russia, which he rejected as a young man, but reaffirmed in later life. Another is the inescapable impact of Russia's political and social transformation.His evolution as a poet naturally occupies a large place in the biography, which quotes many of his most famous poems, including his devastating anti-Stalin epigram. He produced wonderful poetry before the October Revolution, but did not reach his full poetic stature until the 1930s when in exile in Voronezh. He was never an official Soviet poet, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Bukharin that he was brought back from utter impoverishment.The biography gives full weight to his emotional life, beginning with his friendship with two other Russian poets, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, followed by love and marriage to Nadezhda Khazina."One of the century's greatest lyric poets." - Elaine Feinstein, Sunday Times"Mandelstam's poems are both bold and delicate. His imagery can seem both profoundly startling yet entirely natural". - Robert Chandler"Mandelstam was a tragic figure. Even while in exile in Voronej, he wrote works of untold beauty and power. And he had no poetic forerunners. In all of world poetry, I know of no other such case. We know the sources of Pushkin and Blok, but who will tell us from where that new, divine harmony, Mandelstam's poetry, came from?" - Anna Akhmatova"Russia's greatest poet in the twentieth century." - Joseph BrodskyTrade ReviewA timely reminder of both the long history of repression in Russia and the powerful role that literature can play. Dutli's rounded portrait of a Russian poet unafraid to speak truth to power brings to life the man and his time. -- Carl Wilkinson, Best Books of the Year * Financial Times *Likely to become the standard reference work for the English reader ... enlightening -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review *Deftly examines [Mandelstam's] literary legacy and explains why, in the opinion of the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, [he] can be considered the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century -- John Thornhill * Financial Times *[Dutli's] understanding of his subject is profound and his assessments informed ... his sympathetic grasp of Mandlestam's artistic genius should yet be enough to encourage readers to explore some of the greatest poetry of the 20th century. -- Mark Glanville * Jewish Chronicle *Compelling ... [Dutli] provides a vibrant, deeply informed guide to the life, the writing and the tumultuous age that shaped them. -- Clare Cavanagh * Times Literary Supplement *The author, Ralph Dutli, approaches the poet unobtrusively and sensitively. He deconstructs the myths that have surrounded him, such as the notion that he was a restless ascetic who never put down any roots or settled anywhere. It was sheer necessity that forced him to move from place to place. Dutli brings out the sensual and witty side of Mandelstam, who was full of the joys of life. -- Marion Lülte * Die Tageszeitung *This biography crowns Dutli's work as editor of the poet's oeuvre. Thanks to Ralph Dutli, the German public now have the best conceivable access to Mandelstam's work. Dutli hasn't just told the story of Mandelstam's life; he has included in an appendix a range of comments by other poets, the most remarkable of them being that by Pasolini. -- Christoph Bartmann * Süddeutsche Zeitung *This is a biography written with insight and precision, which can be recommended unreservedly. The aim of the book is to explain how Mandelstam managed to retain his enjoyment of life and clarity of vision despite all his suffering. This is a successful biography written with empathy, sobriety and a wealth of information. -- Renate Wiggershaus * Frankfurter Rundschau *A model biography by Dutli, who is better qualified than anyone else to do this, because he has a precise knowledge of every facet of the poet's life and work. He corrects the picture presented by Celan, whose translations overemphasised the tragic, elegiac aspect of Mandelstam's poetry. -- Ulrich M. Schmid * Neue Zürcher Zeitung *The details of the road that led to Mandelstam's death have never been presented to the German public so precisely and with so much tact, as here. Dutli's language is muscular, warm and colourful. -- Andreas Isenschmid * Die Zeit *Dutli is able to illuminate the interaction between the poet's life and his work in a masterly fashion, without reducing his poems to a mere reflection of aspects of his biography. -- Michael Braun * Deutschlandfunk *

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Book SynopsisIn the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security-from Nazi fifth columnists to Soviet spies and today's domestic extremists. Yet, working from official documents released to the National Archives,distinguished historian Caute discovers that suspicion also fell on those who merely exercised their civil liberties, posing no threat to national security. In reality, this 'other history' of the Security Service, was dictated not only by the consistent anti-Communist and Imperial aims of the British state but also by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel. The guiding notions were 'Defence of the Realm' and 'subversion.' Caute here exposes the massive state operation to track the activities and affiliations of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers actors and musicians, who the Security Service classified as a threat to national security. Guilt by association was paramount. Letters were opened, phones were intercepted, private homes were bugged and citizens were placed under physical surveillance by Special Branch agents. Among the targets of surveillance are found such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman. More than 200 victims are listed here but further MI5 files will be released to the National Archives.Trade ReviewRed List reintroduces us to lost generations of artists and writers, many of whom opposed imperial wars and British colonialism in India but disappeared into the annals of history - perhaps due to MI5 influence... [Caute] exemplifies how capitalist superpowers can control their own history and the legacy of radical art. -- Billy Anania * Hyperallergic *An exceptional and seminal work of impeccable scholarship and exhaustive research. * The Midwest Book Review *[Red List] provides a wealth of information about left-wing British intellectuals and artists in the postwar era. -- Richard J. Evans * The Nation *Caute has pieced together an extensive history of MI5 surveillance across the twentieth century...Red List demonstrates that the function of the security state is to foreclose political possibilities before they pose any direct threat to the established order, often ruining countless lives in the process. * Jacobin *Red List is a lucidly written account of MI5's surveillance of [Caute's] country's intelligentsia. * Shepherd Express *Table of ContentsNote on Sources ix List of Abbreviations x Introduction 1 PART I 9 1. MI5 and the First World War 11 2. MI5 and the Communist Party of Great Britain 30 PART II 45 3. Dangerous Voices, Disloyal Pens 47 4. Theatre and Players 98 5. Film Censorship 118 6. Discordant Musicians 125 PART III 133 7. History as Heresy 135 8. Veteran Academics 178 9. Black Liberation and the Africanists 186 PART IV 219 10. Science and Treachery 221 PART V 255 11. Not to Be Trusted 257 12. Illegitimate Lawyers 271 13. Publish and Be Damned 284 14. The BBC Toes the Line 300 15. Art and Design 312 PART VI 339 16. MI5 and the Labour Left 341 Conclusion. MI5 and 'Subversion' 356

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Book SynopsisFrances Hodgson Burnett is remembered today as the author of the children’s classic The Secret Garden, but in her lifetime she had a long and successful career as a novelist, dramatist and writer of children’s stories. Of high literary quality, her novels covered a range of genres, including industrial novels, American-themed social novels, historical novels, transatlantic novels and post–World War I novels. The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett reads her novels in the context of the changing literary field in England and the United States in the years between the death of George Eliot in 1880 through to the Great War. Read as a body of literary fiction in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and T. S. Eliot among others, and read in the context of literary realism, historical fiction, the sensation novel and so on, Burnett’s novels constitute an important thread that chronicles the changing contexts and forms of English and American fiction from the end of the Victorian period to the Jazz Age of the 1920s.Trade Review“Recchio’s book on Frances Hodgson Burnett is an excellent example of a popular woman writer reclaimed in the twenty-first century for her generically varied, financially successful and still relevant fiction. This book is a must for anyone interested in women’s writing, Victorian to modernist literary developments and First World War writing.” —Janine Hatter, Programme Manager, PGTS, Doctoral College, University of Hull, UKWith this literary reclamation of Burnett's novels, Thomas Recchio has made a significant contribution to nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies, persuasively arguing for the recognition of Frances Hodgson Burnett as a serious writer. One way in which The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett develops its in-depth analysis is by exploring intersecting threads of Burnett's life and career, thereby offering rich contexts in which to highlight her craft. - Ruth Y. Jenkins, The Lion and the Unicorn, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 213-215.Recchio offers detailed readings of most of Burnett’s fourteen adult novels (by his count), which he organizes into five roughly chronological clusters grouped by genre and topic. […] This book amply documents Burnett’s prolific work as a novelist for adults, her engagements with and influence on literary traditions in two countries and two centuries, and the rewards of reading her fiction more widely and critically —Victorian StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter One Learning from Elizabeth Gaskell; Chapter Two Writing as an American: The Portrait of a Washington Lady; Chapter Three Historical Dreamscapes and the Vicissitudes of Class: From A Lady of Quality to The Methods of Lady Walderhurst; Chapter Four Transatlantic Alliances in The Shuttle and T. Tembarom; Chapter Five After the Great War: Emerging from the Wasteland in The Head of the House of Coombe and Robin; Bibliography; Index.

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Book SynopsisClever, beautiful. Observant, and better than that, brave - The Scotsman

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Book SynopsisThe compelling biography of the beautiful, talented Garman sisters and the glittering, romantic era in which they lived. Each of the seven Garman sisters were strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild. Born around the turn of the nineteenth century, most of the siblings were to become involved in the radical literary and political circles of British life between the First and Second World Wars. Their morals were unconventional: bisexuality, unfaithfulness and illegitimate children were a matter of course. Nevertheless they were high-minded and intensely loyal. They were the last muses: women who were prepared to sideline their own talent, friendships, material comforts – even their own children – in order to beguile and inspire the men they loved. Cressida Connolly's family biography delves into the lives of three of the sisters in intense and revealing detail. Kathleen Garman, the father's favourite, ran away to London to study music. She was spotted by the American sculptor Jacob Epstein, who promptly fell in love with her, and remained his muse until his death. They had three children, she was shot in the shoulder by his first wife and she finally became Lady Epstein in 1955. Mary Garman came to London with Kathleen and studied art at the Slade. She married poet Roy Campbell, who was to become the scourge of the literary establishment by espousing General Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War. Finally there was Lorna Garman, the youngest and most beautiful of all the family. At sixteen she married the wealthy Ernest Wishart, a landowner, communist and founder of the socialist publishing house Laurence & Wishart, who spent most of his life turning a blind eye to his wife's infidelities. Lorna was the love of Laurie Lee's life and they had a daughter. Lucian Freud painted several pictures for her. Through Cressida Connolly’s skilfull retelling of these remarkable lives, we get an intimate portrait of a golden age of romance, passion and art that is an original, beguiling read.Trade Review'Paints some wonderfully vivid pictures of how difficult the Garmans must have been to live with.' Sunday Telegraph 'Connolly writes with great elegance and perception about this ruthlessly sensual family.' Literary Review ‘A rollicking mix of the familiar and surprising.' Sunday Times ‘A sobering coda and an often hilarious tale.' Independent

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Book SynopsisBorn in Dublin in 1798 and educated at Trinity College, James Henry was a controversially humane doctor, a passionate scholar of Virgilian manuscripts, and a lifelong interrogator of Christianity. More than a century after James Henry’s death, Christopher Ricks came upon his poems – printed but unpublished – in the Cambridge University Library. Within these volumes Ricks discovered poetry ‘unaffectedly direct, sinewy, seriously comic. And brave.’ Henry’s convictions and his humour, his idiosyncrasies and his courage, come through in work that, Ricks writes, ‘has an integrity, a consistency, for all its engaging diversity of topic and tone’. With the publication of the Selected Poems of James Henry, the world at large can hear the voice of a remarkable poet.

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Book SynopsisLimited edition of 100 numbered copies, signed by the author, clothbound and slipcased with a 1904 penny inset on the cover. In 1904, the sending, receiving and collecting of postcards had become an essential part of life in Edwardian Dublin. In an age of few private telephones, the postcard was a popular and reliable form of communication – in Dublin there were six mail deliveries a day, and one on Sunday. To celebrate James Joyce and the centenary of Bloomsday, Niall Murphy has assembled a dazzling selection of 240 postcards, all of them posted in the Dublin area during 1904, four of them sent on 16 June that year. Here are the messages of ordinary people who walked the streets of Dublin side-by-side with the characters of Ulysses, with their words eerily mirroring the novel’s events. There is a rescue from drowning in Kingston; crime and punishment in Grafton Street; the Great Storm of 1903; King Edward’s visit; and memories of a ‘departed day’ spent in Howth. Among the many tales of love, three are enacted in varying degrees of intimacy: Millicent and Francisque de Boissieu, Jack Miller and Maud Tighe, and Ina and John McGregor – echoing Joyce’s use of postcards to establish the blossoming romance between Milly Bloom and Alec Bannon. Published in association with the National Library of Ireland, ‘A Bloomsday Postcard’ features the work of the legendary postcard artists – Louis Wain’s strange human cats; Lance Thackery’s satires of upper-class life; and C. Dana Gibson’s exquisite drawings of beautiful women. Here also are cards depicting the Russo-Japanese War, Yukon gold miners, the Dublin Horse Show, and life in Connemara – creating a mesmerizing full-colour mosaic that brings to life the world of Bloomsday, 1904 like never before.

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Book SynopsisNew approaches to the topics of old age and becoming old depicted in a range of texts from modern literature. The central focus of this book is the experience of growing old as represented in literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day: an experience shaped by changes in longevity, a new science of senescence, the availability of state pensions, and other phenomena of recent history. The collection considers the increasing prominence of stories of ageing, challenging the idea that old age is an uneventful time outside of the parameters of literary narrative. Instead, age increasingly is the story. As the older population swells, political crises are construed as the old stealing from the young, and the rights of older people are sacrificed to the economics of care, it becomes ever more important to think about and question, as literature does, the symbolic aspects of ageing - the cultural imaginary that determines the way that society sees old age. The work in this volume explores age stories in relation to futurity, precarity and climate change. It brings to light narratives of resistance to colonial imperialism and reproductive futurism framed in terms of age; and tests the lived experience of growing old and the challenge it offers to individualistic conceptions of selfhood, work and care. The literary works examined - hailing from England, North America, Japan and the Caribbean, and including texts by Margaret Drabble, Samuel Beckett and Matthew Thomas - ask how we feel about ageing - so often the determinant of how we think about it.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Difference that Time Makes - Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen On Not Knowing How to Feel - Helen Small Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View From and Beyond Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises - Kathleen Woodward Age and Anachronism in Contemporary Dystopian Fiction - Sarah Falcus Grandpaternalism: Kipling's Imperial Care Narrative' - Jacob Jewusiak "I Could Turn Viper Tomorrow": Challenging Reproductive Futurism in Merle Collins's The Colour of Forgetting - Emily Timms Critical Interests and Critical Endings: Dementia, Personhood and End of Life in Matthew Thomas's We Are Not Ourselves - Elizabeth Barry Self-Help in the Historical Landscape of Ageing, Dementia, Work and Gender: Narrative Duplicities and Literature in a "Changing Place Called Old Age" - David Amigoni Toying with the Spool: Happiness in Old Age in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape - Peter Svare Valeur Afterword: When Age Studies and Literary-Cultural Studies Converge: Reading "The Figure of the Old Person" in an Era of Ageism - Margaret Morganroth Gullette

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Book SynopsisIdentifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands: "Internationally Nationalist", "Someone Else's Past?", and "Activist Medievalism". Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered 'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval. 'National' can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once 'medieval' becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past. This collection explores medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction, Mary Boyle I. Internationally Nationalist 1. Making up the Middle Ages: Roman Scotland and Medievalism in the Eighteenth Century, Kristina Hildebrand 2. Emma Letherbrow's Gudrun: Kudrun for 'Modern' Victorians, Mary Boyle 3. Nationalism and Colonialism: The Early German Reception of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Florian Gassner 4. Inhabiting an Unpredictable Past - the Paradoxes of Russian Cultural Historicism, Michael Makin II. Someone Else's Past? 5. The Medievalism of Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly, Sabina Rahman 6. 'The Northland of Old': The Use and 'Misuse' of (Medieval) Iceland, Hannah Armstrong 7. 'Out of My Country and Myself I Go': A Discourse of the Troubadour in British and Irish Literature, Kayleigh Ferguson 8. 'The old magic of the mind': the Influence of Wales and Medieval Welsh Literature in John Cowper Powys's, Maiden Castle, Felix Taylor III. Activist Medievalism 9. 'Green Growing Pains': the 'Green Children of Woolpit' and Child Refugees, Carolyne Larrington 10. Medievalisms of Welcome: Medieval Englishness and the Nation's Migrant Other in Refugee Tales, Matthias D. Berger 11. Nordic Giants: Using Left-Wing Post-Rock to Deepen Our Understandings of White Supremacist Interpretations of Vikings, Eirnin Jefford Franks 12. 'The Great Original Suffragist': Joan of Arc as a Symbol in the U.S. Women's Suffrage Movement, Suzanne LaVere Index

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.Table of ContentsIntroduction - Steven Matthews 1 A 'Dangerous Model': Resisting The Waste Land - Rebecca Beasley 2 Beyond the Sanskrit Words: Decolonizing Eliot in Modernity - Rosinka Chaudhuri 3 'An Icon of Recurrence': The Waste Land's Anniversaries - William Davies 4 'O City, city': Sounding The Waste Land - Hugh Haughton 5 Lost and Found in Translation: Foreign Language Citations in The Waste Land - Marjorie Perloff 6 The Poetic Afterlife of The Waste Land - Andrew Michael Roberts 7 Compositional Process and Critical Product - Peter Robinson 8 Hypocrisy and After: Persons in The Waste Land - Michael Wood Index

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Book SynopsisAn exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Old English language and literary style have long been a source of artistic inspiration and fascination, providing modern writers and scholars with the opportunity not only to explore the past but, in doing so, to find new perspectives on the present. This volume brings together thirteen essays on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, exploring how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by translators, novelists, poets and teachers. These afterlives include the composition of neo-Old English, the evocation in a modern literary context of elements of early medieval English language and style, the fictional depiction of Old English-speaking worlds and world views, and the adaptation and recontextualisation of works of early medieval English literature. The sources covered include W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Seamus Heaney, alongside more recent writers such as Christopher Patton, Hamish Clayton and Paul Kingsnorth, as well as other media, from museum displays to television. The volume also features the first-hand perspectives of those who are authors and translators themselves in the field of Old English medievalism.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Early Medieval English in the Modern Age: An Introduction to Old English Medievalism - Rachel A. Fletcher, Thijs Porck and Oliver M. Traxel 1 Reinventing, Reimagining and Recontextualizing Old English Poetry 1 Old English as a Playground for Poets? W. H. Auden, Christopher Patton and Jeramy Dodds - M. J. Toswell 2 'Abroad in One's Own Tradition': Old English Poetry and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) - Victoria Condie 3 Wulf and Eadwacer in 1830 New Zealand: Anglo-Saxonism and Postcolonialism in Hamish Clayton's Wulf (2011) - Martina Marzullo 4 Old English Poetry and Sutton Hoo on Display: Creating 'the Anglo-Saxon' in Museums - Fran Allfrey II Invoking Early Medieval England and Its Language in Historical Fiction 5 Creating a 'Shadow Tongue': The Merging of Two Language Stages - Oliver M. Traxel 6 At the Threshold of the Inarticulate: The Reception of 'Made-up' English in Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake (2014) - Judy Kendall 7 Reimagining Early Medieval Britain: The Language of Spirituality - Karen Louise Jolly 8 Historical Friction: Constructing Pastness in Fiction Set in Eleventh-Century England - James Aitcheson III Translating and Composing in Neo-Old English 9 Ge wordful, ge wordig: Translating Modern Texts into Old English - Fritz Kemmler 10 Fruit, Fat and Fermentation: Food and Drink in Peter Baker's (Neo-) Old English Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Denis Ferhatović 11 The Fall of the King and the Composition of Neo-Old English Verse - Rafael J. Pascual IV Approaching Old English and Neo-Old English in the Classroom 12 Mitchell & Robinson's Medievalism: Echoes of Empire in the History of Old English Pedagogy - Joana Blanquer, Donna Beth Ellard, Emma Hitchcock and Erin E. Sweany 13 The Magic of Telecinematic Neo-Old English in University Teaching - Gabriele Knappe Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHow ideas and ideals of an imagined, protean, national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why. After a period of abeyance, the link forged in the nineteenth century between the Middle Ages and national identity is increasingly being reclaimed, with numerous groups and individuals mining an imagined medieval past to present ideas and ideals of modern nationhood. Today's national medievalism asserts itself at the interface of culture and politics: in literature and television programming, in journalism and heritage tourism, and in the way political actors of various stripes use a deep past that supposedly proves the nation's steady exceptionalism in a hectic globalised world. This book traces these ongoing developments in Switzerland and Britain, two countries where the medieval past has recently been much invoked in negotiations of national identity, independence and Euroscepticism. Through comparative analysis, it explores examples of reemerging stories of national exceptionalism - stories that, ironically, echo those of other nations. The author analyses depictions of Robert the Bruce and Wilhelm Tell; medievalism in the discourse surrounding Brexit as well as at the Welsh Senedd; novels like Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake; community-based art such as the Great Tapestry of Scotland; and elaborate public commemorations of Swiss victories (and defeats) in battle. Basing his critical readings in current theories of cultural memory, heritage and nationalism, the author explores how the protean national Middle Ages have once again become a convergence point for anxieties about politics, history and cultural identity in our time - and why.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Author's Note List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Constructing Continuity: Four Nations Imagine Their Beginnings PART I THE POLITICS OF AUTOCHTHONY 2 For Freedom Alone: The Scottish Independence Referendum 3 2016 and All That: Brexit 4 Freiheit statt Vögte: The Swiss National-Conservatives PART II THE OTHERS OF NATIONAL MEDIEVALISM 5 Masculine Middle Ages: Gender 6 In Strange Lands: Race, Ethnicity, Immigration Conclusion: The Demands of the Past Afterword: National Medievalism in the Age of COVID-19 Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisEssays exploring interrelated strands of material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing, through a rich variety of case studies. Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the power of material forms, such as oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism: can such an approach only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way? Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography - although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities - can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which have the ability to imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?Table of ContentsIntroduction - John Parham 1.Industry and Environmental Violence in the Early Victorian Novel: Pastoral Re-visions - Mark Frost 2.Floating Cities, Imperial Bodies: Reading Water in Timothy Mo's An Insular Possession (1986) and Xi Xi's 'Strange Tales from a Floating City' (1986) - Caitlin Vandertop 3.Sweet Food to Sweet Crude: Haunting Place through Planet Sam Solnick 4.Nonhuman Entanglements in Adam Roberts's Science Fiction: Bête (2014) and By Light Alone (2012) - Nora Castle 5.Sum deorc wyrd gathers: Dark Ecology, Brexit Ecocriticism, and the Far Right - Aidan Tynan 6.Literature, Literary Pedagogy, and Extinction Rebellion (XR): The Case of Tarka the Otter - Karín Lesnik-Oberstein 7.The View from the Field: Activist Ecocriticism and Land Workers' Voices - Pippa Marland 8.Nature Walking: Marching Against Privilege - Dominic Head 9.To Be a Witness in the World - Amanda Thomson Index

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Book SynopsisNancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anaïs Nin said 'I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.' As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity, a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic. But who was the woman who was with Durrell during the most important years of his development as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother's fascinating story: the escape from her toxic and mysterious family; the years in bohemian literary London and Paris in the 1930s; marriage to Durrell and their discovery of the 'Eden' of pre-war Corfu and her desperate struggle to survive in Palestine alone with a small child as the British Mandate collapsed. Amateurs in Eden is a fascinating biography of a literary marriage and of an unusual woman struggling to live an independent life.Trade ReviewFrank and captivating . . . rich in charm and pathos . . . Hodgkin has done both Nancy and herself proud with this fresh portrait of a marriage we thought we knew, and of a woman we have never known well enough -- Miranda Seymour * Sunday Times *It's a cracking story, and Hodgkin is a meticulous researcher -- Olivia Laing * Observer *The animating spirit that pulses through this joint biography is to be thoroughly applauded -- D.J Taylor * Literary Review *This is not just a memoir of her mother. This is the history of a literary wife. On both counts, Hodgkin succeeds beautifully . . . Her story is not a footnote; it is absolutely central * Independent *A truly fascinating account of one of those many women, the wives and the girlfriends and the sisters of famous literary men, who have lived a twilight existence in the shadows of the historical canon. A particularly rich and honest account * Scotland on Sunday *An enjoyable, revisionist account of a bohemian marriage -- Blake Morrison * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisT. S. Eliot once spoke of a lifetime burning in every moment. He had the mind to conceive a perfect life, and he also had the honesty to admit he could not meet it.'He was a man of extremes whose deep flaws and high virtues were interfused,' writes Lyndall Gordon in this perceptive and innovative biography of the great poet. She brilliantly explores his poetry, drama and essays in relationship to the four quite different women in his life and to his time in America and England. The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot follows the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect.Trade ReviewThe most valuable single book yet published about Eliot -- Jonathan Raban * Sunday Times *A nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection * New Yorker *An intellectually demanding, sophisticated and distinguished book . . . Probing and extremely thoughtful -- Richard Bernstein * New York Times *

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