Critical Survey

After three decades the ‘aesthetic’ has crept back into literary studies. It is twelve years since Isobel Armstrong wrote that ‘the abandonment of the concept of literature and the category of the “aesthetic” . . . is possibly one of the greatest mistakes the left has made this decade’, and eleven since Terry Eagleton traced powerful ideas through a galaxy of philosophers of the last two centuries. Peter Brooks’s article ‘Aesthetics and Ideology: What Became of Poetics?’ appeared in 1994.

Pat Barker chronicles the lives that history ignores, and her best characters, though articulate, often find it hard to make themselves heard. Though her early work has been sometimes passed over by academics as gritty but less inventive than the later, she can be seen from her first novel onwards to be locating herself in a postmodernist tradition. Her use of dialogue, parody and pun, and her commitment to the communal and the choric, constantly remind us that her books are textual inventions; and her novels’ plots, instead of completing a pattern, seldom allow us to believe that her characters are consistent, or that their lives have a unifying purpose.

B. S. Johnson (1933–1973) committed suicide after a short career as a novelist marked both by literary experimentation and critical controversy. Subsequently, in Britain his work is available only second-hand; the substance and texture of his work lost to later generations by his continued absence from British bookshops. Autumn 1999 brought the republication by Picador of The Unfortunates (1969), Johnson’s so-called book-in-a-box, with further plans to retrieve most of his work. This re-emergence provides a new potential co-ordinate for English studies, with an opportunity to re-inscribe a strand of the intellectual history of the post-war period.

In A Personal Record, Conrad tells how, as a small boy, he was fascinated and appalled by a story of his maternal grand-uncle, Nicholas Bobrowski, who served under Napoleon and suffered in the retreat from Moscow. Struggling through the Lithuanian forest and in desperate straits, grand-uncle Nicholas and his two companions came across a village dog and killed it. It was an unsavoury animal, obese with bare patches on its skin, but, as Conrad observes, ‘they had not killed that dog for the sake of the pelt. He was large . . . He was eaten . . .’

The publication of Larkin’s Collected Poems1 in 1988 showed that the poet, whose fame essentially rested on three slim volumes published between 1955 and 1974, had been much more productive than was commonly assumed. More particularly, it drew attention to the considerable body of work that Larkin produced in the 1940s. Since then, it has become clear that Larkin’s work should be discussed, not just in the context of the decades that followed the Second World War, but also in the context of what were undeniably crucial, formative years. Taking the early poetry into account makes it possible to go beyond the incomplete or misleading pictures that earlier assessments had produced: Larkin was not just the uneasy Laureate of the Welfare State, or a poet who found his voice by exchanging Yeats for Hardy. The poems written in the 1940s show that Larkin also responded to other historical developments and to other literary influences.

This excerpt from Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein, I believe, puts into a context the idea of the author’s relation to his/her text, working on two levels at the same time. It is at this point that the ‘author’s’ chase by his creature begins, and it is at this moment that Shelley’s pursuit by her text is phrased. Frankenstein’s ‘text’, a mixture of pieces from dead bodies, is brought to life and begins its wandering and the chase of its ‘author’, at times reading its own body, at other times demanding a change in the author’s narrative, a participation in the ‘writing’ of his destiny.

A Great Grandfather MATT SIMPSON

A Letter to My Daughter in Spain Five Walks With Our Best Man (1992–1997) JOHN GREENING

The Wedding Dress Laika CHARLES BENNETT

Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer Paul Edwards (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), ISBN 0–300–08209–6, hardback £40

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman with Jane de Gay (London: Routledge, 2000), ISBN 0–415–17473–2 paperback £15.99

Seamus Heaney Andrew Murphy (Tavistock: Northcote House, 1996, 2nd Edition, 2000). ISBN 0 7463 09627 paperback £8.99

Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley E. J. Clery (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), ISBN 0 7463 0872 8 paperback £9.99

Notes on contributors