Tony Harrison by Edith Hall

Tony Harrison by Edith Hall

Longlisted for the 2022 Runciman Award

This is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and political concerns. Enriched by Edith Hall’s longstanding friendship with Harrison and involvement with his most recent drama, inspired by Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, it also asserts that his greatest innovations in both form and style have been direct results of his intense engagements with individual works of ancient literature and his belief that the ancient Greek poetic imagination was inherently radical.

Tony Harrison's large body of work, for which he has won several major and international prizes, and which features on the UK National Curriculum, ranges widely across long and short poems, plays, translations and film poems. Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. This volume explores the full breadth of his oeuvre, offering an insightful new perspective on a writer who has played an important part in shaping our contemporary literary landscape.

[Hall’s] shared interests and wide-ranging knowledge of the classical world and its reception, besides her sympathetic understanding of Harrison’s outlook, make this a most engaging study* The Classical Review *
Hall’s book is ... engaging and erudite. * The Scottish Left Review *
Tony Harrison is a persuasive, timely, important study which goes right to the top of any reading list of Harrison scholarship and joins the canon of class-based classical reception studies. * Translation and Literature *

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at the University of Durham and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, UK. She has published more than thirty volumes on ancient Greek and Roman literature and their reception and has been a judge of the Stephen Spender prize for literary translation and the Society for Theatre Research Book of the Year.

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at the University of Durham and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford, UK. Her books on ancient Greek culture and its reception include The Return of Ulysses (2008), Greek Tragedy (2010), Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (2013) and Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2015).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350194588
ISBN 10	1350194581
Title	Tony Harrison
Author	Edith Hall
Series	Classical Receptions In Twentieth-Century Writing
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2022-09-22
Number of pages	248
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.