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Exploring Penda's Fen, a 1974 BBC film that achieved mythic status. In 1974, the BBC broadcast the film Penda's Fen, leaving audiences mystified and spellbound. “Make no mistake. We had a major work of television last night,” The Times declared the next morning. Written by the playwright and classicist David Rudkin, the film follows Stephen, an 18-year-old boy, whose identity, sexuality, and suffocating nationalism unravels through a series of strange visions. After its original broadcast, Penda's Fen vanished into unseen mythic status, with only a single rebroadcast in 1990 sustaining its cult following. With a DVD release by the BFI in 2016, Penda's Fen has now become totemic for those...
Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the book demonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the 'enclosure of the commons' in response to political and ecological crises.
This collection explores what the social and philosophical aspects of veganism offer to critical theory. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars working in animal studies and critical animal studies, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture shows how the experience of being vegan, and the conditions of thought fostered by veganism, pose new questions for work across multiple disciplines. Offering accounts of veganism which move beyond contemporary conceptualizations of it as a faddish dietary preference or set of proscriptions, it explores the messiness and necessary contradictions involved in thinking about or practicing a vegan way of life. By thinking through as well as about veganism, the project establishes the value of a vegan mode of reading, writing, looking, and thinking.
Through its comprehensive history of post-war queer writing in Boston and San Francisco from the 1940s through the 21st century, Never By Itself Alone provides a new view of queer history. Grundy intertwines analysis of lesbian, gay, and queer literature of the time, centering voices which have not yet before been explored in existing criticism. The book elevates the underrepresented work of writers of color and those with gender-nonconforming identities, underscores the link between activism and literature, and insists upon the vital importance of radical accounts of race, class and gender in any queer studies worthy of the name
The commons and enclosure are among the most vital ways of thinking about poetry today, posing urgent ecological and political questions about land and resource ownership and use. Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry through this lens, by putting it in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the book demonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the 'enclosure of the commons' in response to political and ecological crises. It identifies a 'commons turn' in contemporary lyric that contests the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction...
Poetry & Strikes examines shifting representations of strike action in the work of six British poets from the 1970s to the present day. It considers how these poets have come to contend with, and contribute to, narratives surrounding industrial disputes. Through these conversations, the book attempts to question the way in which union narratives and legacies are constructed, and to investigate the power dynamics that underpin the presentation of labour histories. The work of these poets helps us to understand how cultural memories have been formed, and makes it possible to see how these legacies may still be rewritten and reframed.
Revision of the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of California, Berkeley, 2016, under the title: Pilot zones: the new urban environment of twentieth century Britain.
Radical Tenderness argues for the importance of poetry in negotiating political and social catastrophes, through a focus on the unusual intimacies of committed writing. How do poets negotiate between the personal and the public, the bedroom and the street, the family and class or communal ties? How does contemporary lyric, with its emphasis on the feelings and perceptions of the individual subject, speak to moments of shared crisis? What can poetry tell us about how care shapes our experiences of history? How do the intimacies found in protest, on strike, in riots, and in spaces of oppression, transform individual lives and political movements? Through a series of focussed readings of four twenty-first century poets - Caleb Femi, Bhanu Kapil, Juliana Spahr and Anne Boyer - Radical Tenderness reflects the perspectives provided by intimate poetries on the shared political emergencies of poverty, war, ecological catastrophe, racism, and illness.
What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse? The Romantic period's upheaval cast both traditional communal organizations of life and outgrowths of the new revolutionary age into crisis. In this context, Joseph Albernaz argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of "groundless community," while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present. Amidst the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers including the Wordsworths, Clare, Hölderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceiv...