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 theLiverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.‘Whoever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel ofthe 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to theWhite Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLSThis book breaks new ground in studies of the Britishnovelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essaysproduced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition ofLowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to theWhite Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggsshow how the publication of In Ballastsheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeplyinfluenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist SigbjørnHansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his ownconscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and socialreform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowryscholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation tothe wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialismand communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and thesignificance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on theunexpected 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 theLiverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.‘Whoever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel ofthe 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to theWhite Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t’ – Michael Hofmann, TLSThis book breaks new ground in studies of the Britishnovelist Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), as the first collection of new essaysproduced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition ofLowry’s ‘lost’ novel, In Ballast to theWhite Sea. In their introduction, editors Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggsshow how the publication of In Ballastsheds new light on Lowry as both a highly political writer and one deeplyinfluenced by his native Merseyside, as his protagonist SigbjørnHansen-Tarnmoor walks the streets of Liverpool, wrestling with his ownconscience and with pressing questions of class, identity and socialreform. In the chapters that follow, renowned Lowryscholars and newer voices explore key aspects of the novel and its relation tothe wider contexts of Lowry’s work. These include his complex relation to socialismand communism, the symbolic value of Norway, and thesignificance of tropes of loss, hauntings and doublings. The book draws on theunexpected 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.

This Spring issue of Hinterland celebrates the limitless reach of life writing. Between them, our writers explore adoption, suicide, sexual assault, the AIDS crisis, conscription, grandparents, trauma, and the enduring influence of Elizabeth Bishop. Headlining this issue we celebrate a work seminal to the genre of life writing: Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, with a collection of exclusive-to-Hinterland pieces by Christopher Bigsby, Victor Sage and Sharon Tolaini-Sage, with a foreword by Kathryn Hughes, that illuminate and respond to the legacy of Sage’s memoir, now entering its third decade of continuous publication.