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This book is a comprehensive critical introduction to one of the most original contemporary British writers, providing an overview of all of Iain Sinclair's major works and an analysis of his vision of modern London. It places Sinclair in a range of contexts, including: the late 1960s counter-culture and the British Poetry Revival; London's underground histories; the rise and fall of Thatcherism; and Sinclair's writing about Britain under New Labour and Sinclair's connection to other writers and artists, such as J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Marc Atkins. The book contributes to the growing scholarship surrounding Sinclair's work, covering in detail his poetry, fiction, non-fiction (including his book on John Clare, Edge of the Orison), and his film work. Using a generally chronological structure, it traces the on-going themes in Sinclair's writing, such as the uncovering of lost histories of London, the influence of visionary writings, and the importance of walking in the city, and more recent developments in his texts, such as the focus on spaces outside of London and his filmic collaborations with Chris Petit. The book provides a critically informed discussion of Sinclair's work using a variety of approaches.
This article considers the use made of William Blake by a range of writers associated with the ‘countercultural’ milieu of the 1960s, particularly those linked to its London-based literary context. Iain Sinclair is offered as a writer who, in his appreciation of Blake, stands apart from the poets linked to the anthology, Children of Albion (1969). The article unpacks this distinction, analysing Sinclair’s ‘topographic’ take in comparison to the ‘visionary’ mode of his contemporaries. Having established this dualism, the argument then questions the nature of the visionary poetics assumed to apply to the likes of key poets from the era. The work of Michael Horovitz is brought into view, as is that of Harry Fainlight. In essence, these multiple discourses point to the plurality of Blake as a figure of influence and the variation underpinning his literary utility in post-1960s poetry.
Wallace explores nineteenth-century ghost stories written by Elizabeth Gaskell, and later tales by May Sinclair, and Elizabeth Bowen. Using ideas drawn from Modleski and Irigaray she argues that such tales explore how a patriarchal culture represses/buries images of the maternal. She further argues that the ghost story enabled women writers to evade the marriage plots which dominated the earlier Radcliffean Female Gothic, meaning that they could offer a more radical critique of male power, violence and predatory sexuality than was possible in either the realist, or indeed Gothic, novel. Wallace argues that the ghost story functions as the ‘double’ or the ‘unconscious’ of the novel, giving form to what has to be repressed in the longer, more ‘respectable’ form.
the mix (see also Aquilino, 2011 ; Charlesworth, 2014 ; Meinhold, 2013 ; Sinclair and Stohr, 2006 ). Faced by this stream of ideas and proposals, many aid workers have concluded architects are moving in the opposite direction from humanitarians. Whereas humanitarians focus on process, architects focus on product. Whereas humanitarians aim to get existing shelters up to minimum standards, architects develop utopian visions in glorious isolation from reality. Since
22 On the back of the elephant: riding with Charles Olson Iain Sinclair I have a theory by which I try, but fail, to live: which is that at this stage in life I don’t want to go anywhere I can’t walk.1 This presented problems when I was exploring America, which I’ve been doing for a book I’ve been working on, and which I’ll be drawing into this discourse; a book called American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. What it’s about is the fact that when I began, when I was firing up my first enthusiasms in the early 1960s, I was captured by the figure of
6 •• How to know about right and wrong 1 Alison Sinclair Éste es el contagio, el vil contagio, que baja de la literatura al pueblo.2 (This is the contagion, the wretched contagion, that comes down from literature to the common people.) (Valle-Inclán, Los cuernos de Don Friolera (1921)) As the character Don Estrafalario reminds us in Los cuernos de Don Friolera (The horns of Mr Silly) by the Spanish modernist author Ramón del ValleInclán, there are links to be perceived between literature and behaviour, between discourse and practice, between culture and
: College Press, 2001 ). 17 See: Georgina S. Sinclair, ‘‘Settlers’ Men or Colonial Policemen? The Ambiguities of Colonial Policing, 1945–1980’, PhD (University of Reading, 2002). 18 The Greeks interpreted polis as issues
Commissioner of Police’, Secret, 10 June, 1967, Eates, Family Papers. 94 Scobell (interview), Feb. 2000. 95 Gaylord & Traver, ‘Colonial Police’, p. 231. 96 Kevin Sinclair & Nelson
, Diözesanblatt , 23 January 1919, pp. 4–5. 32 NFP , 14 January 1927, evening edition, p. 2. 33 On Seipel and authoritarianism, see Edmondson, Heimwehr , pp. 80–83 and Diamant, Austrian Catholics , pp. 113–116. See also Michael Carter-Sinclair, ‘All the German Princes Driven Out: The Catholic Church in Vienna and the First Austrian Republic,’ in Paul Miller and Claire Morelon (eds), Embers of Empire (New York: Berghahn, 2019), pp. 177–202 for a fuller discussion of the Church and its attitudes towards the Republic and towards democracy in general. 34 Carsten