The elegiac aspect of Ted Hughes' poetry has been frequently overlooked, an oversight which this book sets out to rectify. Encompassing a broad range of themes, from the decline of nature and local industry to the national grief caused by the First World War, this book is a comprehensive addition to the study of Hughes' poetry.
The Grief of Influence follows Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes through alternating periods of collaboation and competition, showing how each poet forged a voice both through and against the other's, and offering a new assessment of the twentieth century's most important poetic partnership.
This innovative casebook introduces readers to wide-ranging critical dialogue about the work of Ted Hughes, one of the most popular and influential British poets of the 20th century. In twelve new essays, international authorities on Hughes examine and debate his work, shedding new light on familiar texts. Split into two parts, the first half of this book examines Hughes' work through cultural contexts, such as postmodernism and the carnivalesque, while the second part uses literary theories including postcolonialism, ecocriticism and trauma theory to interpret his poetry. Providing fresh inspiration and insights into the various diverse ways in which Hughes' writing can be interpreted, this volume is an ideal introduction to both literary theory and the work of Ted Hughes for literature students and scholars alike.
Including a previously unpublished poem by Ted Hughes, as well as new essays from Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage, Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected offers fresh readings and newly available archival research, challenging established views about Hughes's speaking voice, study at Cambridge and the influence of other poets on Hughes's work.
The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes’s proposition that ‘every child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments — political, as well as geographical — which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, ‘the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’.
Fay Godwin is commonly regarded as this country's finest landscape photographer. Ted Hughes, who was born and brought up in the part of the world she has captured in these atmospheric studies, was inspired by them to provide a verse text, one of the most personal things he has written.
This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes’s understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in ‘green’ ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library’s new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics.
Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime's reading, interests and experience gave him access. The achievement of Ted Hughes as one of the major poets of the twentieth century is complimented by his growing reputation as a writer of letters, plays, literary criticism and translations. In addition, Hughes made important contributions to education, literary history, emergent environmentalism and debates about life writing. Ted Hughes in Context brings together thirty-four contributors who inform new readings of the works, and conceptualize Hughes's work within long-standing critical traditions while acknowledging a new awareness of his future importance. This collection offers consideration not only of the most important aspects of Hughes's work, but also the most neglected.