Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer

by Stephen Cooper

Critics have tended to label Larkin’s poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin’s artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems’ commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. … This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin’s friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer’s concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin’s artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin’s entire oeuvre.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004