New Larkins For Old

Larkin's work continues to yield fresh and sometimes surprising readings. This volume juxtaposes widely different essays by established commentators and younger critics from England, Northern Ireland, the USA, Canada, Belgium and Hungary. Individual contributors discuss Larkin's unpublished fiction and the journals of his lover, Patsy Strang. Others examine Larkin's novels and poetry in the light of existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, postmodern, postcolonial and Bakhtinian theories. Some contributors define Larkin's Englishness in relation to forerunners such as Lawrence, Eliot, Auden and MacNeice, or anchor his work in the malaise of postwar Britain. Other contributors search out mystical, placeless, 'factless' or aesthetic Larkins who transcend such historicist readings.