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This book argues that Tony Harrison’s poetry is barbaric. It revisits one of the most misquoted passages of twentieth-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno’s apparent dismissal of post-Holocaust poetry as "impossible" or "barbaric". His statement is reinterpreted as opening up the ...

This book argues that Tony Harrison’s poetry is barbaric. It revisits one of the most misquoted passages of twentieth-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno’s apparent dismissal of post-Holocaust poetry as "impossible" or "barbaric". His statement is reinterpreted as opening up the possibility that the awkward and embarrassing poetics of writers such as Harrison might be re-evaluated as committed responses to the worst horrors of twentieth-century history. Most of the existing critical work on Harrison focuses on his representation of class, which occludes his interest in other aspects of historiography. The poet’s predilection for establishing links between the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prospect of global annihilation is examined as a commitment to oppose the dangers of linguistic silence. Hence Harrison’s work can be read fruitfully within the growing field of Holocaust Studies: his texts enter into arguments about the ethics of representing traumatic incidents that still haunt the contemporary. Harrison’s status as a "non-victim" author of the events is stressed throughout. His writing of the Holocaust, allied bombings and atom bomb is mediated by his reception of the events through newsreels as a child, and his adoption and subversion, as an adult poet, of traditional poetic forms such as the elegy and sonnet. This book also discusses the ways in which Holocaust literature engages with a number of concepts challenged or altered by the historical events, such as love, mourning, memory, humanism, culture and barbarism, articulacy and silence.

Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- ) has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a number of prizes for his poetry, including ...

Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- ) has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a number of prizes for his poetry, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Royal Television Society Award, the Prix Italia, and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. This book gives his work the serious critical attention it merits, with essays from a number of prominent contributors, including Richard Eyre and Melvyn Bragg, and a foreword by Grey Gowrie. The collection ranges from personal recollections of working with Tony Harrison and personal responses to his poems, to detailed critical analyses of his techniques and themes, covering Harrison's short poems and sonnet sequence, his plays, his television poem-films, and his libretti, spanning the years 1955-1997. A `loiner' is a native of Leeds, where Tony Harrison was born and spent the early part of his life, and from which he was dispossessed by the enforced translation of the state scholarship system. The word also connotes other aspects of Tony Harrison: the `loins' of his poetry--its energy and physicality--and the `loners' who are its main protagonists--men and women dispossessed of their class, nation, language, and identity. At sixty, Harrison is at his poetic peak, producing plays, film-scripts, libretti, journalistic responses to social and national strife, impassioned speeches of love and outrage--always in poetry. Tony Harrison: Loiner introduces the major themes and forms of our most exciting and cosmopolitan as well as technically accomplished poet, and reassesses his achievement and place in twentieth-century literature.