Nicholas Jenkins – författare

The second volume in the Auden Studies Series, The Language of Learning and the Language of Love considers Auden primarily during the first decade of his literary career as a public figure as well as private man. It includes previously unpublished poems, prose, and letters by Auden - each with a scholarly introduction and full annotation - which reveal how the well-known poet, teacher, dramatist, and sage battled with his literary ancestors, experienced love, and devised a rhetoric to express both homosexual feelings and artistic impulses.Contributions to this volume include poems, songs, and a piece of early travel writing introduced by Auden's new biographer, the historian Richard Davenport-Hines. Lyrics offered to Benjamin Britten as cabaret songs are presented by Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed, and Nicholas Jenkins. Also in the volume is a fascinating array of essays about Auden by leading scholars in the field, including Stan Smith and Katherine Bucknell, and the German scholar and close friend of Auden, David Luke. A further Supplement to B.C. Bloomfield's magisterial Auden Bibliography of 1972 is supplied by Edward Mendelson.

This is the first volume in a new series on the work of the poet W. H. Auden. The volume contains a large amount of Unpublished material by Auden, notably six poems written in German in the early 1930s, translated here by the poet and scholar David Constantine, as well as the complete version of the important early essay, `Writing', with a new foreword by its original editor Naomi Mitchison. There are substantial selections from Auden's letters to Stephen Spender and to E. R. Dodds and Mrs Dodds: these are the first Auden letters to receive a scholarly presentation with full annotation. Also in the volume are essays about Auden and his mentors and contemporaries, by leading scholars in the field such as Valentine Cunningham, John Fuller, Julian Symons, and Stan Smith, as well as by outstanding newcomers. For bibliophiles, there is advice on collecting Auden's works, and Edward Mendelson has contributed a Supplement to his comprehensive W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969.

The third volume of Auden Studeis presents Auden in maturity, and includes a large amount of previously unpublished prose by him. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures printed here demonstrate the Goethean scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics.In Solitude, for Company contains two hitherto unpublished and little-known lectures. The first of these, introduced by Nicholas Jenkins, is on the theme of vocation, delivered during the troubled war years when Auden was examining his own vocation. The second lecture was given near the end of the poet's life, on the subject of the value of the work of Sigmund Freud. Katherine Bucknell precedes this with the first full-length examination of Auden's intensely ambivalent relation to Freud. Auden's correspondence with his close friends James and Tania Stern reveals much new and important biographical information, and Edward Mendelson's further supplement to the Auden Bibliography provides an extensive listing of all published letters by Auden. In addition, distinguished literary critics, including David Bromwich, Lawrence Lipking, Edna Longley, and Michael Wood, together with the nonagenarian communist Edward Upward, contribute to a symposium on one of this century's most famous poems, 'In Praise of Limestone'.

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art.In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man.The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'.Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today.'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.'Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.'Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.'Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden

Winner of the 2024 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary CriticismWinner of the Northern California Book Award for General Nonfiction'The Island makes an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of both Auden's intentions and his achievement in the first part of his writing life.' Andrew Motion, New Statesman'Jenkins, miner-like, digs down into the verse and brings every influence up to the surface . . . a richly striated landscape, not only in complexity of mood, but also courtesy of its cast of strange, dazzling and sometimes highly dubious characters.' Rachel Cooke, ObserverNicholas Jenkins's The Island is daring in its ideas, written with loving tenderness and implacably true in its revisionism. Jenkins shows Auden's mentality to have been graven by the Great War, proves his youthful aspiration to become an English national poet and renews our sense of the numinous.' Richard Davenport-Hines, TLS, Books of the Year'[The Island is] a dense, detailed and hugely rewarding account of the making of this very English poet before he became an American one.' Peter Parker, TLS Books of the Year'In The Island (Faber, £25), an epic study of the young W.H. Auden, Nicholas Jenkins brilliantly scales up fine-grained literary criticism into wide-angled cultural history.' Boyd Tonkin, SpectatorA groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden's early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.W. H. Auden is a towering figure in modern literary history with a complex private self. Hannah Arendt wrote that he had 'the necessary secretiveness of the great poet'. The Island lays bare for the first time some of the most telling 'secrets' of Auden's early poetry, his world, his emotional life, his values and the sources of his art.In a book that is an argument but also a story, Nicholas Jenkins gives compelling readings of iconic poems. He presents Auden in the inter-War years as both a visionary writer, creatively dependent on dreams and intuitions, and a traumatized poet, haunted by war and suffering, and shadowed by his outsider status as a privileged but queer man.The Island considers, as well, Auden's imaginative flirtations with a lyrical nationalism appealing to a poet who, for a while, felt his psyche was like a map of English culture. The narrative ends in Auden's disillusionment with these potent myths and beliefs and the time when he left 'the island'.Auden's preoccupations - with the vicissitudes of war and the problems of love, belonging and identity - are of their time but they still resonate profoundly today.'A superb, deeply researched study of Auden's early work and identity. Jenkins's understanding of young Auden as a poet shaped and haunted by the First World War - assimilating the influence of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and W. H. R. Rivers - is convincing, original, and poignant. Fusing biography, cultural history, and literary criticism in innovative and elegant ways, The Island is a landmark publication in modernist studies.'Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'Nicholas Jenkins is one of our most perceptive and resourceful critics. In this wonderful study of the early Auden, he brings to bear history, biography, and an acute sense of the artistic moment to fashion for us a young genius who is conservative, bucolic, gay, a patriotic adherent of post-imperial Little England. Most people work backwards from a writer's ultimate reputation, but Jenkins gives us a new, unexpected image of a poet developing in the aftermath of World War I and the collapse of modernism.'Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover'The Island is a Copernican Revolution in Auden studies, a revelatory and often exciting book that presents a new and convincing account of Auden's early years. It explores, for the first time, the deep connections between the inner workings of his poems and the worlds of politics and economics. By bringing to light Auden's ambition to be a national poet, Jenkins transforms our understanding of not only Auden himself but all of modernist literature.'Edward Mendelson, author of Early Auden and Later Auden

Lincoln Kirstein's writing is a notable example of a wide historical awareness that was fired by passion and guided by taste. Best known for his pioneering efforts to cultivate ballet in the United States, he actively pursued a professional partnership with legendary choreographer George Balanchine, with whom he founded both the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. This collection, in paperback for the first time, showcases Kirstein's knowledge of dance, painting, photography, theatre, politics, and literature and combines many of his best-known and most authoritative statements with less familiar but equally brilliant polemics and appreciations. Along with autobiographical essays and poetry, his commentary covers such diverse personalities as composer Igor Stravinsky, photographer Walker Evans, author Ernest Hemingway, actress Marilyn Monroe, and Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the courageous black Civil War regiment. The book also contains photographs from Kirstein's private collection - portraits of himself and other famous artists of the time, such as Diaghilev, Cocteau, and Eisenstein, among others.

Dementia is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. Responding to the global dementia challenge, however, affects more than humans alone. We live in a multi-species world but often think about dementia in mono-species ways. From the lab to the living room, other beings are “on the scene” and our relations with them affect how we understand, experience, and respond to dementia. Drawing on cutting-edge work across the social and biological sciences, this book offers readers the tools to respond to dementia in multi-species ways. By exploring a range of topics, from pathology to personhood, contributors highlight how thinking about dementia as a more-than-human phenomenon may enable new ways of responding to our global dementia challenge.