Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn
Author: Michael Nott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374721378

A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.

At the Barriers

At the Barriers
Author: Joshua Weiner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226890376

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.

Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain

Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain
Author: Alan Sinfield
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2007-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1441185593

Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain is a landmark work in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. It offers a provocative and brilliant account of political change since 1945 and how such change shaped the cultural output of our time. It also looks at how and when literature intersects with other cultural forms - including jazz and rock music, television, journalism, commercial and "mass" cultures - and the growth of American cultural dominance. This edition includes a new foreword by the author.

The Open Door

The Open Door
Author: Don Share
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 0226750736

“If readers would like to sample the genius and diversity of American poetry in the last century, there’s no better place to start.” —World Literature Today When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. To celebrate the magazine’s centennial, the editors combed through Poetry’s incomparable archives to create a new kind of anthology. With the self-imposed limitation to one hundred, they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Here, Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; famous poems of the two world wars flank a devastating yet lesser-known poem of the Vietnam War; Short extracts from Poetry’s letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices. The resulting volume is a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English

A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English
Author: Harry Blamires
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2021-06-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000287645

First published in 1983, A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a detailed and comprehensive guide containing over 500 entries on individual writers from countries including Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the UK. The book contains substantial articles relating to major novelists, poets, and dramatists of the age, as well as a wealth of information on the work of lesser-known writers and the part they have played in cultural history. It focuses in detail on the character and quality of the literature itself, highlighting what is distinctive in the work of the writers being discussed and providing key biographical and contextual details. A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English is ideal for those with an interest in the twentieth century literary scene and the history of literature more broadly.

A History of British, Irish and American Literature

A History of British, Irish and American Literature
Author: Hans-Peter Wagner
Publisher: WVT (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier)
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2021-10-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3868219218

The third revised and enlarged edition contains discussions of British, Irish and American literary works up to 2020. Focussing on outstanding writings in prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction, the book covers the time from the Anglo-Saxon period to the 21st century. The feature that makes this literary history unique among its rivals is the coverage of television/web series as a particular form of postmodern drama. The chapters on recent drama now contain detailed analyses of the development of TV and web series from Britain, Ireland and America, with extensive discussions of those series now considered classics. In addition, there are several major innovative features. To begin with, each century is introduced by a survey of the socio-political and cultural backgrounds in which the literary works are embedded. Furthermore, extensive visual material (more than 160 engravings, cartoons and paintings) has been integrated. This visual aspect as well as the introductory sections on art for each century give the reader an excellent idea of the symbiosis between visual and literary representations. Further innovative aspects include - discussions of non-fictional works from literary criticism and theory, travel writing, historiography, and the social sciences - analyses of such popular genres as crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, the Western, horror fiction, and children’s literature - footnotes explaining technical and historical terms and events - a detailed glossary of literary terms - chronological tables for British/Anglo-Irish and American literatures an updated (cut-off date 2020), extensive bibliography containing suggestions for further reading

Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History

Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History
Author: Robert Aldrich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000143066

First published in 2004. With subjects drawm from politics, the arts and popular culture, Who's Who in Contemporray Gay & Lesbian History, includes 500 entries from a large team of expert international contributors. The geographical scope takes in the whole of the Western world. Includes fascinating information about little-known figures as well as cult icons from World War II to the present day.

Twentieth-Century English Literature

Twentieth-Century English Literature
Author: A. Norman Jeffares
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1986-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349185116

In revising this book for a second edition, Harry Blamires has updated his final chapters to give a thorough coverage to the work of dramatists, novelists and poets who have achieved prominence in the 1980s, either as new writers or rediscovered authors who have recently been brought back into print or revived by radio and television.

W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden
Author: Dr John Haffenden
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113472313X

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

The Letters of Thom Gunn

The Letters of Thom Gunn
Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2022-05-24
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 037460570X

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).