Neo lines: Alan Hollinghurst and the apogee of the eighties

When Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in October 2004, it sealed the arrival in fiction of a retrospective exploration of the 1980s which had already been unmistakable in British culture. While the political continuities from Margaret Thatcher’s social revolution have been a central topic in the analysis of Tony Blair’s administrations, the return of the 1980s in popular culture has also been evident for years. Literature has not been insulated from this climate. Since the turn of the millennium Nicola Barker’s Five Miles From Outer Hope (2001), Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane (2002) and David Peace’s GB84 (2004) have been prominent examples of the ‘neo-1980s’ novel in Britain. It is on Hollinghurst’s book, however, that this essay will focus. To whose 1980s does The Line of Beauty return us? What is at stake

The middle years of Martin Amis

This essay was commissioned by Rod Mengham and Philip Tew for their volume British Fiction Today (London and New York: Continuum, 2006). Essays for this volume were specifically requested to focus on writers’ work since 1990. Thus the essay does not pretend to be a detailed account of Amis’s entire career, only to describe, contextualize and assess one stretch of it. The essay was written in summer 2005; hence the last major Amis work referred to here is Yellow Dog (2003). The system of referencing also reflects the specifications given the editors. British Fiction Today appeared in autumn 2006. In that printed version of the essay, the editors have made certain alterations. The version here, for what it’s worth, is all my own work

Estopped by Grand Playsaunce: Flann O'Brien's Post-colonial Lore

This article seeks to extend our understanding of the Irish writer Flann O'Brien (Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan) by reading him from a Law and Literature perspective. I suggest that O'Nolan's painstaking and picky mind, with its attention to linguistic nuance, was logically drawn to the languages of law. In this he confirmed the character that he showed as a civil servant of the cautious, book-keeping Irish Free State. The Free State, like other post-colonial entities, was marked at once by a rhetoric of rupture from the colonial dispensation and by a degree of legal and political continuity. I suggest that O'Nolan's writing works away at both these aspects of the state, alternating between critical and utopian perspectives. After establishing an initial context, I undertake a close reading of O'Nolan's parodies of actual legal procedure, focusing on questions of language and censorship. I then consider his critical work on the issue of Irish sovereignty, placing this in its post-colonial historical context. Finally I describe O'Nolan's treatment of Eamon de Valera's 1937 Constitution. I propose that his attention to textual detail prefigures in comic form the substantial rereadings of the Constitution that have been made in the last half-century

Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

Post for the department of English & Humanities blog, Birkbec

Fiction in a fictionalized society

Book synopsis: The new millennium has been a period of rapid change and under this stimulus British fiction has evolved in new and sometimes unpredictable directions. It is the mercurial nature of its subject matter, which makes the study of contemporary British fiction both so dynamic and yet so challenging. New voices, forms and themes sometimes require the discarding of old critical frameworks and the creation of new. With this in mind we have endeavoured to create a truly forward-thinking collection that not only maps the journey of British fiction in the new millennium so far, but which also hints at the path ahead

Has the world changed or have I changed? The Smiths and the challenge of Thatcherism

Book synopsis: For five short years in the 1980s, a four-piece Manchester band released a collection of records that had undeniably profound effects on the landscape of popular music and beyond. Today, public and critical appreciation of The Smiths is at its height, yet the most important British band after The Beatles have rarely been subject to sustained academic scrutiny. Why pamper life's complexities?: Essays on The Smiths seeks to remedy this by bringing together diverse research disciplines to place the band in a series of enlightening social, cultural and political contexts as never before. Topics covered by the essays range from class, sexuality, Catholicism, Thatcherism, regional and national identities, to cinema, musical poetics, suicide and fandom. Lyrics, interviews, the city of Manchester, cultural iconography and the cult of Morrissey are all considered anew. The essays breach the standard confines of music history, rock biography and pop culture studies to give a sustained critical analysis of the band that is timely and illuminating. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, literature, geography, cultural and media studies. It is also intended for a wider audience of those interested in the enduring appeal of one of the most complex and controversial bands. Accessible and original, these essays will help to contextualise the lasting cultural legacy of The Smiths