The Literary North [Hardcover]

According to Orwell, the North was 'a strange country.' In an industrial landscape, its inhabitants seem to inhabit a bleak world caught in the gaze of 1930s realism. Such stereotypes have been tenacious. This book challenges these stereotypes, establishing the strategic and mobile nature of 'the North' and the effects of literary realism.List of Illustrations Preface Notes on Contributors Introducing the Literary North; K.Cockin 'The Chimneyed City': Imagining the North in Victorian Literature; J.Guy 'By the People, For the People': The Literary North and the Local Press 1880-1914; J.Hewitt The Sublime and Satanic North: The Potteries in George Moore's A Mummer's Wife (1885) and Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns (1902); A.Heilmann Clog-dancers and Clay: The Geography of Arnold Bennett's North in Clayhanger; R.Robbins 'Dirty Old Town': The Presentation of the Northern Cityscape in Ewan MacColl's Landscape with Chimneys ; C.Warden 'The North, My World': W.H. Auden's Pennine Ways; A.Sharpe Northern Yobs: Representations of Youth in 1950s Writing: Hoggart, Sillitoe and Waterhouse; N.Bentley The Unknown City: Hull and the North in the poetry of Larkin, Dunn and Didsbury; S.O'Brien 'Northern Working-class Spectator Sports': Tony Harrison's Continuous; J.Gill North-east Childhood: Representations of the North-east of England in the Work of Robert Westall; N.Dalrymple 'Where you going now?': Themes of Alienation and Belonging in the North-east in Children's Literature; R.Lee The North in Children's Fiction; T.Cosslett The Literary Response to Moss Side, Manchester: Fact or (Genre) Fiction?; L.Pearce Locating the Literary North; K.Cockin Selected Bibliography Index

'...a readable, ground-breaking collection that ranges chronologically from nineteenth-century regional and industrial novels to Northern cyberpunk...would certainly appeal to a wider audience' - David Collard, TLS

NICK BENTLEY Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele University, UKTESSl&