Critics have tended to label Larkin's poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin's artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems' commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin's friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer's concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s.
- ISBN10 1845192230
- ISBN13 9781845192235
- Publish Date 10 October 2004
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 5 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Sussex Academic Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 208
- Language English