In this book, Raphael Ingelbien examines how issues of nationhood have affected the works and the reception of several English and Irish poets - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. This studyexplores the interactions between post-war English poets and the ways in which they transformed or misread earlier poetic visions of England - Romantic, Georgian, Modernist."

Englishness and Post-imperial Space: The Poetry of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes probes into the English mindset immediately after the British withdrawal from the colonies, and examines how the loss of power and global prestige affected contemporary poetry, particularly that of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Frustration and disillusionment, even anger, characterised the era and many of the literary works the period produced. Most writers became insular and were obsessed with the ‘English’ elements in their writing. The great, international and cosmopolitan themes (of Eliot, for instance) were replaced by those of narrow domestic importance. It is in such a context, this book argues, that Larkin and Hughes returned to the old England, most notably to the themes of gradually vanishing pristine landscape and national myths and legends, to the archetypal English customs and conventions. It examines their poetry mainly from the perspective of Englishness, a burgeoning area of academic interest. Intricately connected with the values emanating from England as a geographical and socio-cultural space, Englishness as a concept is intrinsic to the identity of a people who gradually became globally powerful. The loss of empire dealt a severe blow to this sense of the self. This book explores the dynamics of the representation of this sense of loss and the frustration it produced in the poems of Larkin and Hughes.

European National football came together in the summer of 2012 for the 14th occasion. This book sets out to examine the enduring social tensions between supporters and authorities, as well as those between local, national and European identities, which formed the backdrop to the 14th staging of the European National football tournament, Euro2012. The context of the tournament was somewhat unique from those staged in previous years, being jointly hosted for the first time by two post-Communist nations still in the process of social and economic transition. In this respect, the decision to stage Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine bore its own material and symbolic legacies shaping the tournament: the unsettling of neo-liberal imaginings and emergent ‘East-West’ fears about poor infrastructure, inefficiencies and corruption jostled with moral panics about racism and fears surrounding the potentially unfulfilled consumerist expectations of west European supporters. The book seeks to explore the ideologies and practices invoked by competing national sentiments and examine the social tensions, ambiguities and social capital generating potentials surrounding national, ethnic, European identity, with respect to national football teams, supporters and supporter movements. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

What is the relationship between poetry and power? Should poetry be considered a mode of authority or an impotent medium? And why is it that the modern poets most commonly regarded as authoritative are precisely those whose works wrestle with a sense of artistic inadequacy? Such questions lie at the heart of this study, prompting fresh insights into three of the most important poets of recent decades: Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. Through attentive close reading and the tracing of dominant motifs in each writer’s works, James shows how their responsiveness to matters of political and cultural import lends weight to the idea of poetry as authoritative utterance, as a medium for speaking of and to the world in a persuasive, memorable manner. And yet, as James demonstrates, each poet is exercised by an awareness of his own cultural marginality, even by a sense of the limitations and liabilities of language itself.

It has long been established that the crisis of 1066 generated a florescence of historical writing in the first half of the twelfth century. Emily A. Winkler presents a new perspective on previously unqueried matters, investigating how historians' individual motivations and assumptions produced changes in the kind of history written across the Conquest. She argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early twelfth-century historians in England not only extract English kings and people from a history of failure, but also establish English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale. Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing illuminates the consistent historical agendas of four historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and Geffrei Gaimar. In their narratives of England's eleventh-century history, these twelfth-century historians expanded their approach to historical explanation to include individual responsibility and accountability within a framework of providential history. In this regard, they made substantial departures from their sources. These historians share a view of royal responsibility independent both of their sources (primarily the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and of any political agenda that placed English and Norman allegiances in opposition. Although the accounts diverge widely in the interpretation of character, all four are concerned more with the effectiveness of England's kings than with the legitimacy of their origins. Their new, shared view of royal responsibility represents a distinct phenomenon in England's twelfth-century historiography.

Max Porter is amongst the most exciting British writers of the twenty-first century. His striking books straddle the divide between poetry and prose as deftly as they combine literary experimentation with mainstream success. This book is the first study of his works to date, which encompass Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), The Death of Francis Bacon (2021) and Shy (2023). It features a broad interdisciplinary array of essays (by poets, novelists, literary critics, art historians and educationalists), which collectively place Porter’s works in their contexts, shed light on his artistic vision and interpret his texts from a range of critical perspectives. The volume’s 12 chapters combine readings of the literary, formal, intertextual and experimental aspects of Porter’s works with discussions of their relation to social, political and ethical questions, whilst placing them in dialogue with highly topical critical and cultural debates, such as Englishness in the aftermath of Brexit, ecocriticism, affectivity and posthumanism.