Synopses & Reviews
This collection brings together essays by established commentators on Larkin's work and by younger critics: from England, Northern Ireland, the USA, Canada, Belgium and Hungary. Individual essays examine Larkin's novels and poetry in the light of psychoanalytical, postmodern, postcolonial and Bakhtinian theories. This collection shows that Larkin's work continues to yield fresh and sometimes surprising readings.
Synopsis
Fifteen essays written by critics from the US, the UK, and Europe address an array of themes in the work of novelist and poet Philip Larkin, including his unpublished fiction and the journals of his lover Patsy Strang; his novels and poetry in light of existentialist, psychoanalytic, postmodern, postcolonial, and Bakhtinian theories; his Englishness in connection with writers such as Lawrence, Eliot, Auden, and MacNeice; and the relationship of his thought to the broader malaise of postwar Britain.
About the Author
James Booth is Reader in English at the University of Hull.
Table of Contents
Introduction: New Larkins for Old--James Booth * Larkin's Money--Barbara Everett * Larkin, Decadence and the Lyric Poem--Edna Longley * The Two Philip Larkins--John Carey * Patricia Avis and Philip Larkin--George Gilpin * Unreal Girls: Lesbian Fantasy in Early Larkin--M.W. Rowe * New Worlds for Old: Mythology and Exile in the Novels of Philip Larkin--Liz Hedgecock * Philip Larkin and
Lady Chatterly's Lover : Exploring an Influence--Terry Whalen *
In the Grip of Light : Philip Larkin's Poetry of the 1940s--Stephen Regan * The Uses of Symbolism: Larkin and Elliot--Raphaël Ingelbien * Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in the Poetry of Philip Larkin--John Osborne * 'The lost displays': Larkin and Empire--Steve Clark * Larkin and the Mundane: Mystic without a Mystery--Ian Almond * From Here to Bogland: Larkin, Heany and the Poetry of Place--James Booth * Native Carnival: Philip Larkin's Puppet-theatre of Ritual--V. Penelope Pelizzon * Larkin from an East European Perspective--Istvan D. Racz