Literary Subjectivity

Keynote Address from 1996 conference discussion the place of art-writing in contemporary society. the article refers to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and its relationship to earlier literature by Gosse and Eliot

Queering Thatcher: whatever happened to politics and culture in the 1980s?

Thatcherism was an incoherent form of governmentality which marked the end of both the traditional left and the traditional conservative right. It also contributed to literary culture's loss of authority. A loss of authority which also, however, meant an increase of literature's truth-telling power. Alan Hollingshurst’s The Line of Beauty was such a powerful truth-telling novel about the Thatcherite period in part because it critiqued Thatcherism by appealing to death's blind finality as uncovered in the HIV epidemic of the period