Book description
Karl Miller is one of the greatest literary critics of the last fifty
years, the founder of the London Review of Books and Lord Northcliffe
Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London.
In this last book of essays he turns his attention to appreciate certain
writers of the English-speaking modern world. Most of them are
inhabitants of the North Sea archipelago once known as Great Britain,
who are here seen as tribally distinct, as Scottish, English, Irish or
Welsh, and as a single society. A new ruralism has come to notice in
this country, and the book is drawn to country lives as they have
figured in the literature of the last century. An introductory essay
is centred on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Journeys taken with Seamus
Heaney and Andrew O'Hagan to this countryside, and others, are threaded
throughout the book. The poets Heaney and Ted Hughes are discussed,
together with the fiction of Ian McEwan, the Canadian writer Alistair
Macleod, the Irish writer John McGahern and the Baltimorean Anne Tyler.
Scotland is a preoccupation of the later pieces, including the letters
of Henry Cockburn, a lifelong interest of the author, who is also
interested here in foxes and their current metropolitan profile. Karl
Miller is one of the greatest literary critics of the last fifty years,
the founder of the London Review of Books and Lord Northcliffe Professor
of Modern English Literature at University College, London. In this
last book of essays he turns his attention to appreciate certain writers
of the English-speaking modern world. Most of them are inhabitants of
the North Sea archipelago once known as Great Britain, who are here seen
as tribally distinct, as Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh, and as a
single society. A new ruralism has come to notice in this country, and
the book is drawn to country lives as they have figured in the
literature of the last century. An introductory essay is centred on
the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. Journeys taken with Seamus Heaney and
Andrew O'Hagan to this countryside, and others, are threaded throughout
the book. The poets Heaney and Ted Hughes are discussed, together with
the fiction of Ian McEwan, the Canadian writer Alistair Macleod, the
Irish writer John McGahern and the Baltimorean Anne Tyler. Scotland is
a preoccupation of the later pieces, including the letters of Henry
Cockburn, a lifelong interest of the author, who is also interested here
in foxes and their current metropolitan profile.
