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The post-war British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-77) painted male figures, whether alone or in groups, as a life-long enquiry into identity, sensuality, and the sanctity of the body. Yet Vaughan was not only a supremely accomplished painter; he was an impassioned, eloquent writer. Commenced in the summer of 1939 as war across Europe seemed inevitable, Vaughan’s journal was a space in which he could articulate ideas about politics, art, love and sex during a period of great political and personal upheaval. Image of a Man is the first book to provide a comprehensive critical reading of Vaughan’s extraordinary journal, which spans thirty-eight years and sixty-one volumes to form a major literary work and a fascinating document of changing times. From close textual analysis of the original manuscripts, this book uncovers the attitudes and arguments that shaped and reshaped Vaughan’s identity as a man and as an artist. It reveals a continual process of self-construction through journal-writing, undertaken to navigate the difficulties of conscientious objection, the complications of desire as a gay man, and the challenges of making meaningful art. By focussing on Vaughan’s journal-writing in the context of its many influences and its centrality to his art practice, Image of a Man offers not only a compelling new critical biography of a significant yet underappreciated artist, but also a sustained argument on the constructed nature of the ‘artist’ persona in early and mid-twentieth-century culture – and the opportunities afforded by life-writing, specifically journal and diary forms, to make such constructions possible.

This volume takes into account the variety of talents that inform not only Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six best-selling novels, but also her philosophical, theological and critical writing, which together express stringent views on art, politics and morality. It identifies Murdoch as a proudly Anglo-Irish writer whose work straddles the boundary between popular and intellectually serious novels which spanned the entire latter half of the twentieth century. This thematically based study outlines the overarching themes and issues that characterise her fiction decade by decade; explores her unique role as a British philosopher-novelist; explains the paradoxical nature of her outspoken atheism and highlights the neglected aesthetic aspect of her fiction, which innovatively extended the boundaries of realist fiction by borrowing from the visual arts, drama, poetics and music. The importance of the settings of her homeland of Ireland and her beloved London concludes the study, and while Iris Murdoch is acknowledged throughout as a writer who vividly evokes the zeitgeist of the late twentieth century she is also presented as one whose unconventional life and complex presentation of gender and psychology speaks perhaps more urgently to twenty-first century readers than they did to those of the century in which she wrote.

This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This book is about the literature of the Irish in London. By examining over 30 novels, short stories, and autobiographies set in London since the Second World War, it investigates the complex psychological landscapes of belonging and cultural allegiance found in these unique and personal perspectives on the Irish experience of migration. As well as bringing new research to bear on the work of established Irish writers such as Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Emma Donoghue, and Joseph O'Connor, this study reveals an unexplored literature, diverse in form and content. By synthesizing theories of narrative and diaspora into a new methodological approach to the study of migration, the author sheds light on the ways in which migrant identities are negotiated, mediated, and represented through literature. The book also examines the specific role that the metropolis plays in literary portrayals of migrant experience as an arena for the performance of Irishness, as a catalyst in transformations of Irishness, and as an intrinsic component of second-generation Irish identities. Furthermore, by analysing the central role of narrative in configuring migrant cultures and identities, it reassesses notions of exile, escape, and return in Irish culture more generally. The book has relevance to current debates on migration and multiculturalism in both Britain and Ireland, especially in the wake of an emerging new phase of Irish migration in the post-‘Celtic Tiger’ era.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) has been acclaimed as one of the finest novelists of the late-twentieth century. Four of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. One of them, Offshore (1979), won. Her final work of historical fiction, The Blue Flower (1995), won the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Fitzgerald’s works are distinguished by their acute wit, deft handling of emotional tone and an unsentimental yet deeply felt commitment to portraying the lives of those men, women and children ’who seem to have been born defeated’. Admirers have long recognized the brilliance of Fitzgerald’s writing, yet the deceptive simplicity of her style invariably leads readers to ask, ‘How is it done?’ This book seeks to answer that question, providing the first sustained exposition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s compositional method, working both inwards from the surface of her writing and outwards from the archival evidence of Fitzgerald’s own drafts and working papers. The book’s six main chapter cover the full range of Fitzgerald’s writing, including her extensive critical writing, her three biographies, nine novels, numerous short stories, poems and letters. It also considers Fitzgerald’s literary reputation and influence, and contains a biographical outline, an appendix of uncollected and unattributed poems, and an annotated bibliography.

This book offers an extended exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in Britain by focusing on a selection of recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. It argues that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism: the politics of opposing discrimination which manifest at the level of state legislation, within local and national activism, and inside the scholarly exploration of race. It is antiracism that now most strongly conditions the emergence of racial categorisations but also of racial identities and models of behaviour. This sense of how antiracism may determine the form and content of both political debate and individual identity is traced through an examination of ten novels by black British and British Asian writers. These authors range from the well known to the critically neglected: works by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Fred D'Aguiar, Ferdinand Dennis, Hanif Kureishi, Gautam Malkani, Caryl Phillips, Mike Phillips, Zadie Smith, and Meera Syal are read to explore the impacts of antiracism. These literary studies are grouped into three main themes, each of which is central to the direction of racial political identities over the last two decades in Britain: the use of the continent of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture; the changing forms of Muslim culture in Britain; and the emergence of a multiculturalist ethos based around the notion of ethnic communities.

This book is the first collection of scholarly essays on alternate history in over a decade and features contributions from a mixture of major figures and rising stars in the field of science fiction studies. Alternate history is a genre of fiction which, although connected to the genres of utopian, dystopian and science fiction, has its own rich history and lineage. With roots in the writings of ancient Rome, alternate history matured into something close to its current form in the essays and novels of the nineteenth century. In more recent years a number of highly acclaimed novels have been published as alternate histories, by authors ranging from science fiction bestsellers to Pulitzer Prize-winning literary icons. The success and popularity of the genre is reflected in its success on television with original concepts being developed alongside adaptations of iconic texts. This important collection of essays seeks to redress an imbalance between the importance and quality of alternate history texts and the available scholarship and critical readings of texts, providing chapters by both leading scholars in the field and rising stars. The chapters in this book acknowledge the long and distinctive history of the genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century contemporary fiction texts which have received little or no sustained critical analysis elsewhere in print.

In a time of protracted economic crisis, failing political systems, and impending environmental collapse, one strand in our collective cultural myth of Progress – the technological – remains vibrantly intact, surging into the future at ramming speed. Amid the seemingly exponential proliferation of machine intelligence and network connectivity, and the increasingly portentous implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists look to an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed. The Singularity, it is supposed, can be no more than a few years off; indeed, some believe it has already begun. Technological Singularity – a trope conceived in science fiction and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse and beyond – is the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, a territory where longstanding binary oppositions between science and fiction, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. In this groundbreaking volume, the first to mount a sustained and wide-ranging critical treatment of Singularity as a subject for theory and cultural studies, Raulerson draws SF texts into a complex dialogue with contemporary digital culture, transhumanist movements, political and economic theory, consumer gadgetry, gaming, and related vectors of high-tech postmodernity. In theorizing Singularity as a metaphorical construct lending shape to a range of millennial anxieties and aspirations, Singularities also makes the case for a recent and little-understood subgeneric formation – postcyberpunk SF – as a cohesive body of work, engaged in a shared literary project that is simultaneously shaping, and shaped by, purportedly nonfictional technoscientific discourses.

Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers was written in four drafts between August 1910 and November 1912. During that period Lawrence’s mother died, he finally broke with Jessie Chambers, the original of Miriam, had an affair with Alice Dax, the main model for Clara, had a year-long engagement to Louie Burrows, nearly died of pneumonia, gave up teaching, met Frieda Weekley and lived abroad with her in Germany and Italy. When he began Sons and Lovers he was a schoolteacher in south London writing after work in the evenings; when he completed it he was a full-time professional writer living with Frieda in Italy. The writing of the novel and the life on which it was based were closely intertwined. Moreover, Frieda and Jessie crucially influenced the writing of the book. Jessie wrote sections of it herself and encouraged Lawrence to make it more directly autobiographical. Frieda introduced Lawrence to the concept of the Oedipus Complex. In many ways the book is the result of dialogues with Jessie and Frieda. Jessie was devastated with the outcome, which she considered a slander and a betrayal. But Lawrence incorporated her answering voice, as well as Frieda’s, in the text. This book combines biography and textual scholarship to bring to life the dramatic story of the writing of Sons and Lovers.

Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”

As well as examining the points of contact and the differences and antagonisms that lie between Surrealism and SF, this collection is concerned with the related literature of comics, which were admired and exploited by Surrealists from the 1940s, and influenced in turn by the imagery, themes and styles of Surrealism and its art. It is about Surrealism specifically, and how the movement in France, the US, and Britain used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF and comics. Among the aims of the book are an assessment of Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the ‘new’ literature arriving in France, which received, in fact, a mixed reception from the later Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. It looks in two further essays at the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists JG Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí’s closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters on Surrealism and comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman ‘M. Wzz…’ of 1929 (never discussed in any detail before) to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton’s strip Les Pieds nickelés. As in the chapters on SF, it goes on to show how Surrealism did not just receive and adapt the genre but impacted it in its later manifestations.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of other women writers during the first decades of the twentieth-century.  This volume not only expands our understanding of an unprecedented number of female writers but also helps us comprehend the ways that these writers contributed to and complicated modernist literature.  It explores how burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersected with and coexisted alongside Virginia Woolf and emphasizes both the development of enclaves and specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf.  The essays in the first section, “Who Are Virginia Woolf’s Female Contemporaries,” explore the boundaries of contemporaneity by considering women across nation, time, and class.  The second section, “Cultural Contexts,” explores Woolf’s connections to early twentieth-century culture such as film and book societies. The two final sections, “Recovery and Recuperation,” and “Connections Between Canonical Writers,” illuminate the interlocking network of women writers and artists, the former through women who have been bereft of scholarly attention and the latter through women who have received more scholarly attention.  One of the most enticing sections of the volume is the collection of essays presented during the conference’s Jane Marcus’s memorial. Three of Marcus’s students celebrate the life, work, and influence of this unparalleled Woolf scholar.

The works of Mervyn Peake have fascinated readers for sixty years. His Gormenghast sequence of novels stands as one of the great imaginative accomplishments of twentieth-century literature. This book sets Peake's fiction in context with the poetry, plays, and book illustrations that are less well known. The author traces recurrent motifs through Peake's works (islands, animals, and loneliness, for example) and explores in detail Peake's long-neglected play, The Wit to Woo.

Love on the Dole (1933) is the best-remembered novel about the unemployed during the Depression, and has never been out of print. Its working-class author, Walter Greenwood, went overnight from being unemployed in Salford to being a best-selling writer. The novel’s impact was increased by a play adaptation in 1935, and Greenwood proposed a film adaption in 1936, but the British Board of Film Censors pronounced the story too ‘sordid’ and depressing’ to be fit for British cinema audiences. The film had to wait until 1940 when the Ministry of Information allowed this story of pre-war economic and social failure to be filmed. Reviewers of all political persuasions regarded the film as one of the best British wartime productions – and all three versions of Love on the Dole were referred to frequently during wartime debate about how a reconstructed post-war society should make a repetition of the nineteen thirties impossible. This is the first book-length study of this important work. It explores in detail what made the novel so influential among thirties and forties readers, analyses the considerable differences between the novel, play and film versions and puts the public response to Love on the Dole back into its full historical context. The book also discusses for the first time Greenwood’s whole literary career and his continuing success until the nineteen sixties: he wrote a further ten novels as well as plays and non-fiction works, few of which have received recent critical attention.

Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.

Featuring interviews and essays from the likes of Alan Bleasdale, Terence Davies, Linda Grant, Roger McGough, Willy Russell, Levi Tafari, and Paul Du Noyer, the book asks if there is a distinctive Liverpool literary voice, and if so, how it can be identified. It locates Liverpool as a city with a complex literary and cultural heritage, charting its ongoing connections and affiliations with Ireland, Wales, and the United States as well as the importance of its working-class culture, particularly arising from its seafaring history. The introduction considers the ways in which Liverpool, though central because of its status as second port of Empire, was, by the middle of the twentieth century, very much at the margins of British culture. The chapters explore poetry, novels, drama, TV drama, and film from writers as diverse as James Hanley, Malcolm Lowry, J. G. Farrell, Beryl Bainbridge, Brian Patten, Linda la Plante, and Ramsey Campbell, and demonstrate the remarkable strength and depth of creative talent in the city.

Bringing together leading scholars of modern and contemporary literature, this book considers the ways in which modernization has shaped Irish identity over the course of the past century. It examines the complex literary manifestations of Ireland and Irishness from the turn of the twentieth century to very recently. Together with analyses of the nation, the book explores Irish identities that may be sexual, racial, regional, gendered, disabled and able-bodied, traumatized and in the process of healing. The book takes up the question of what it means to write modern Ireland, evoking the many resonances that name will carry: a mythic place, a land controlled from elsewhere, a nation hoped for and achieved, a nation denied and resisted, an island divided, an idea soaked in fantasies and dreams, a homeland abandoned in searches for brighter futures, a land of opportunity, a people who are many people, and a place defined by writers who both empower and challenge it. W. B. Yeats looms large, as he does in modern Irish literature, and in commemoration of his sesquicentennial year.