Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture [Hardcover]

The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughess proposition that every child is natures chance to correct cultures error. Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments  political, as well as geographical  which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live. 

1. Ted Hughes and the Environmental Humanities - Terry Gifford.- 2. 'The nuptial flight': Hughes and the Mayfly - Mark Wormald.- 3. Ted Hughes's Paradise - Neil Roberts.- 4. Why look at animals? - Danny O'Connor.- 5. Coetzee's Hughesian Animals - Claire Heaney.- 6. The Nature of Ted Hughes's Similes - James Castell.- 7. The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of Ted Hughes - Vidyan Ravinthiran.- 8. 'Imagination Alters Everything': Ted Hughes and Place - Janne Stigen Drangsholt.- 9. 'Our Chaucer': Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Medieval Reading - James Robinson.- 10. 'The Remains of Something': Ted Hughes and the Mabinogi - Katherine Robinson.- 11. Ted Hughes's Apocalyptic Origins - John Goodby.- 12. Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations Contextually in Ted Hughes's Cave Birds - Carrie Smith.- 13. The Influence of Ted Hughes: the case of Alice Oswald - Laura Blomvall.- 14. Ted Hughes's Urbanity - Seamus Perry.