Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 827
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- ISBN
- 9780719097171
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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11
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Working with Flannery over 5 years, Mendelssohn was responsible for the original concept, principal oversight of commissioning, and editing of the 12 newly commissioned 6,000 word chapters. This innovative, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of one of Britain's most important contemporary novelists. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. Mendelssohn sole-authored an original 6,000 word chapter titled “Poetry, Parody, Porn and Prose” which treats Hollinghurst’s entire oeuvre – from his 1970s poetry and essays right through to the novels of the 2000s – demonstrating how it lacerates normative ideas about masculinity. The chapter shows how Hollinghurst’s parodic drive is most often exposed by the novels’ relationships with literary precursors as well as visual objects – the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, the homoerotic drawings of Tom of Finland or the religious painting of Holman Hunt. These intertexts are foils reflective of a festive sexual world with a supple melancholy. Mendelssohn shows how Hollinghurst explores the gap between these erotic carnivals: weighty, disruptive moments of disappointment, disconnection and grief that give sombre substance to his aesthetics.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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