Margaret Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue

by Jennifer Birkett (Editor), Brigantichiara (Revised by), Chiara Briganti

Edwin Morgan was born in 1920 in Glasgow and studied at Glasgow University where he later taught literature. He is much admired for his experimental writings, his social poems, as well as for the diversity of his output. The present book comprises a chapter on Morgans early vision poems (which have received scant critical attention hitherto); two on his hodoiporika, The Cape of Good Hope and The New Divan; a chapter on his deployment of the grotesque mode, centred chiefly on the Instamatic Poems and The Whittrick; another on his adaptations of the elegy, in which Edgecombe propose a new genre called the thanasimon; and, finally, an examination of his various monologic poems, read in terms of his avowed enterprise of voicing the universe. The study is topped by a prologue that sets out the consistency of Morgans vision over time, and tailed by an epilogue that connects his various critical pronouncements to his remarkably diverse output.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 2007

About the author

Jennifer Birkett is Emeritus Professor of French Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques. She held the Established Chair of French Studies from 1990 to 2011, having previously been Professor of French at the University of Strathclyde. Her research is grounded in French Studies and is strongly interdisciplinary, focusing on the relations between history, politics, ideology, and narrative form. Her specialist interests include the fin de siècle, women’s writing, eighteenth-century fiction, modern drama, and Franco-British cultural exchanges. She has held senior academic leadership roles, including President of the Association of Professors and Heads of Departments of French, and played a key role in establishing the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Arts and Humanities. Her publications include major studies of Samuel Beckett, French Decadence, and the writer Margaret Storm Jameson, alongside influential edited volumes and essays published internationally.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough and perceptive study of a neglected author who, although a Yorkshire lass, was recognised as a European writer who sought to express an understanding of the age in which she lived an winessed the effects of two world wars.