Helen Tookey – författare

Helen Tookey presents a new study of Anaïs Nin (1903-77), focusing both on the cultural and historical contexts in which her work was produced and received, and on the different versions of Nin herself - as a modernist, a woman writer, a public (and controversial) figure in the women's liberation movement, and as a set of conflicting and often extreme representations of femininity. The author shows how contextual feminist approaches shed light on Nin (who moved from Paris modernism of the 1930s to US second-wave feminism of the 1970s), and how this sheds light on key issues and conflicts within feminist thinking since the 1970s, particularly questions of identity, femininity, and psychoanalysis. Anaïs Nin: Fictionality and Femininity provides new readings of Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make an intervention into critical debates around modernism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, writing and identity, fictionality and femininity.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLSThis book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.‘Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLSThis book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs show how the publication of In Ballast sheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeply influenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist Sigbjørn Hansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his own conscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and social reform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowry scholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation to the wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialism and communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and the significance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on the unexpected opportunity offered by the rediscovery of In Ballast to look afresh at Lowry’s oeuvre, to ‘remake the voyage’.

Weaving together literary criticism, memoir and place-writing, this book takes the reader on an immersive journey through the landscapes – textual and geographical, remembered and reimagined – of the Wirral-born novelist, poet and short-story writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–57). At the same time, it follows the author’s own evolving engagement with Lowry as she uses him to ‘think with’, turning his texts and her readings of them through unexpected angles, exploring questions of place and belonging, exile and home. Moving through the various terrains of Lowry’s life and work – Liverpool and the Wirral peninsula, where he grew up; Dollarton in British Columbia, where he found his always-threatened idyll; the terrain of the archive; and the richly textured, symbolic landscapes of his writing itself – the book offers a compelling, lyrical and often moving account of a sustained readerly engagement with a writer and what it can enable. At the same time, it pays tribute to the humour, beauty and passion to be found in Lowry’s writing, to his deeply felt sense of place and his prescient concern for the natural world. Outward Bound from Liverpool explores how reading can change us, and shows why Malcolm Lowry is a writer very much worth reading – and re-reading – today.