Joseph Brooker

Sado-monetarism: Thatcherite subjects in Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis

This article reads Martin Amiss Money (1984) alongside Alasdair Grays contemporaneous novel 1982 Janine. Drawing on Stuart Halls analyses of Thatcherism as a contradictory ideological formation ‘speaking in the ear’ of the subject, the article presents both novels as troubled monologues from within the imaginative ideological space of a new Conservatism.

Remember Everything: Things Past in Station Island

‘Time was a backward rote of names and mishaps’, we are informed by ‘The First Kingdom’, five poems into the first third of Station Island (1984).3 The primary reference here is to the attitudes and habits of the country people among whom Seamus Heaney grew up in Derry,4 and this vision of the past is characteristic of the newly cold eye evident in the ‘Sweeney Redivivus’ section of the book. The backward rote might even be a more general problem. R. F. Foster records a flight of fancy entertained by A. E. in 1914, in which a book of Irish history, steadily improving through the centuries, turns out to have been bound backwards.5 At least that book was encouraging while it lasted. In a glummer view, what the past has to show is mourning and misery, defeat and betrayal, wrongs to be remembered, Stephen Dedalus’s ‘tale like any other too often heard’.6 A good deal of Heaney’s work entertains such a relation to the past, imagining it as dead weight, buried guilt or vice versa. In this essay, however, I want to explore some of the other figurations of the past in Station Island.

The Man in the Hat

Flann O’Brien was the best-known pen name of the Irish comic writer Brian O’Nolan. After early years spent as a dazzling wit in Dublin magazines, he published his first novel At Swim-Two-Birds with Longman’s in 1939. The book was a fabulous montage of literature and life, uproarious but demanding; the author later blamed Nazi Germany for the war that had distracted the world’s attention from it. The follow-up, the surreally astonishing The Third Policeman, was rejected by Longman’s, and not published till a year after O’Nolan’s death in 1966. Stung by this reversal of fortune, O’Nolan retreated into other work: primarily his day job as a civil servant (from 1935 to 1953) and his other day job as a comic newspaper columnist for the Irish Times (1940–1966). The latter generated Cruiskeen Lawn, a continuous serial of wit, pedantry and satire, which was initially written in Irish but gradually settled in the English language. Within a few years, O’Nolan’s new guise Myles na gCopaleen had become one of Dublin’s best-known, though imaginary, characters. The column inspired O’Nolan to pen a novella in Irish: An Béal Bocht, an affectionate satire of wide-eyed peasant memoirs from the Irish-speaking West, was received with interest in 1941 but only translated, as The Poor Mouth, after its author’s death. O’Nolan wrote a few plays in the 1940s—the longest, Faustus Kelly, ran for a fortnight at the Abbey Theatre—but otherwise his literary career was modernism / modernity

Has the world changed or have I changed

Book synopsis: For five short years in the 1980s, a four-piece Manchester band released a collection of records that had undeniably profound effects on the landscape of popular music and beyond. Today, public and critical appreciation of The Smiths is at its height, yet the most important British band after The Beatles have rarely been subject to sustained academic scrutiny. Why pamper lifes complexities?: Essays on The Smiths seeks to remedy this by bringing together diverse research disciplines to place the band in a series of enlightening social, cultural and political contexts as never before. Topics covered by the essays range from class, sexuality, Catholicism, Thatcherism, regional and national identities, to cinema, musical poetics, suicide and fandom. Lyrics, interviews, the city of Manchester, cultural iconography and the cult of Morrissey are all considered anew. The essays breach the standard confines of music history, rock biography and pop culture studies to give a sustained critical analysis of the band that is timely and illuminating. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, literature, geography, cultural and media studies. It is also intended for a wider audience of those interested in the enduring appeal of one of the most complex and controversial bands. Accessible and original, these essays will help to contextualise the lasting cultural legacy of The Smiths.

Introduction: listen to Money singing

This is the Editors Introduction to this special issue of Textual Practice dedicated to Martin Amiss Money (1984). The Introduction discusses Moneys reflections on reading, situates the novel in recent literary history, and outlines its distinctive style and its commentary on gender and class politics. Moneys place amid a culture of 1980s revivalism is also considered. Finally, the Introduction outlines each of the following essays.

Mind that Crowd: Flann O’Brien’s Authors

Summer 1940, and a couple of letters have appeared in the Irish Times: the first bemoaning the lack of support for a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901); the second blaming this state of affairs on the Irish people’s love for American films, and on pro-Gaelic xenophobia among Dublin intellectuals. A response appears, signed ‘F. O’Brien’.

The fidelity of theory: James Joyce and the rhetoric of belatedness

Book synopsis: This book presents for the first time a collective examination of the issue of audience in relation to Joyce’s work and the cultural moments of its reception. While many of the essays gathered in this volume are concerned with particular readers and readings of Joyce’s work, they all, individually and generally, gesture at something broader than a specific act of reception. Joyce’s Audiences is an important narrative of the cultural receptions of Joyce but it is also an exploration of the author’s own fascination with audiences, reflecting a wider concern with reading and interpretation in general. Twelve essays by an international cast of Joyce critics deal with: the censorship and promotion of Ulysses; the ‘plain reader’ in modernism; Richard Ellmann’s influence on Joyce’s reputation; the implied audiences of Stephen Hero and Portrait; Borges’s relation with Joyce; the study of Joyce in Taiwan; the promotion of Joyce in the U.S.; the complaint that there is insufficient time to read Joyce’s work; the revisions to “Work in Progress” that respond to specific reviews; strategies of critical interpretation; Joyce and feminism; and the ‘belated’ readings of post-structuralism.