John Burnside

Description

Celebrated as a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer and the winner of numerous leading literary prizes including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, John Burnside is one of Britain’s leading contemporary writers. John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives brings together leading scholars of contemporary poetry and literature to guide readers through the full range of the author's writings, from his poetry to his autobiographical and nature writing. The book explores the major themes of Burnside's work, including the environment and the natural world, hauntings and his intertextual engagement with philosophy, music and the visual arts. Including a timeline of Burnside’s life and times and an interview with the writer himself, this is the first authoritative guide to this major contemporary writer. Cover Contents Series Editors’ Preface Foreword: Starting Hares (Nicholas Royle) Acknowledgements Contributors Chronology of John Burnside’s Life By Way of an Introduction: John Burnside, Writer Ben Davies 1 John Burnside’s Metaphysical World: From The Dumb House to A Summer of Drowning Peter Childs 2 John Burnside’s Numinous Poetry Jan Wilm 3 ‘A Temporary, Sometimes Fleeting Thing’: Home in John Burnside’s Poetry Monika Szuba 4 Violent Dwellings and Vulnerable Creatures in Burning Elvis and Something Like Happy Alexandra Campbell 5 ‘This Learned Set of Limits and Blames’: Masculinity, Law and Authority in the Work of John Burnside Ruth Cain 6 Consequences of Pastoral: The Dialectic of History and Ecology in The Light Trap Tom Bristow 7 Walking the Tightrope: Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies and John Burnside’s Glister Phill Pass 8 ‘A Kindred Shape’: Hauntings, Spectres and the Poetics of Return in John Burnside’s Verse David Borthwick 9 ‘It Was Suddenly Hard Winter’: John Burnside’s Crossings Julian Wolfreys The Space at the Back of the Mind: An Interview with John Burnside Ben Davies Notes Further Reading Index