Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture

Description

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’. Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 Ted Hughes’s ‘Greening’ and the Environmental Humanities (Terry Gifford)....Pages 3-20 The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly (Mark Wormald)....Pages 21-37 Ted Hughes’s Paradise (Neil Roberts)....Pages 39-52 Why Look at Animals? (Danny O’Connor)....Pages 53-67 Coetzee’s Hughesian Animals (Claire Heaney)....Pages 69-85 The Nature of Ted Hughes’s Similes (James Castell)....Pages 87-106 The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of Ted Hughes (Vidyan Ravinthiran)....Pages 107-123 Imagination Alters Everything: Ted Hughes and Place (Janne Stigen Drangsholt)....Pages 125-139 Front Matter ....Pages 141-141 ‘Our Chaucer’: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Medieval Reading (James Robinson)....Pages 143-159 ‘The Remains of Something’: Ted Hughes and The Mabinogion (Katherine Robinson)....Pages 161-176 Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins (John Goodby)....Pages 177-194 Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations Contextually in Ted Hughes’s Cave Birds (Carrie Smith)....Pages 195-213 The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald (Laura Blomvall)....Pages 215-230 Hughes and Urbanity (Seamus Perry)....Pages 231-244 Back Matter ....Pages 245-256