Brian Baker
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719069048
- eISBN:
- 9781781700891
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719069048.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines the ‘British poetry revival’ that Sinclair was engaged in when he wrote and published Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It considers the importance of William Blake to Suicide ...
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This chapter examines the ‘British poetry revival’ that Sinclair was engaged in when he wrote and published Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It considers the importance of William Blake to Suicide Bridge, and examines the factors that were used to define the poetic practice of the British poetry revival poets. It then shows how Sinclair adopted Michael Faraday's conception of the field for the purposes of cultural and social critique, and how Sinclair included the fourth dimension—namely time—in the Suicide Bridge. Finally, it shows how Nicholas Hawksmoor helped Sinclair reimagine London and its myths, and discusses Sinclair's troubling and conflicted understanding of the workings of myth and the scientific metaphors he used in his works.Less
This chapter examines the ‘British poetry revival’ that Sinclair was engaged in when he wrote and published Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. It considers the importance of William Blake to Suicide Bridge, and examines the factors that were used to define the poetic practice of the British poetry revival poets. It then shows how Sinclair adopted Michael Faraday's conception of the field for the purposes of cultural and social critique, and how Sinclair included the fourth dimension—namely time—in the Suicide Bridge. Finally, it shows how Nicholas Hawksmoor helped Sinclair reimagine London and its myths, and discusses Sinclair's troubling and conflicted understanding of the workings of myth and the scientific metaphors he used in his works.
David Anderson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198847199
- eISBN:
- 9780191882104
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198847199.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its ...
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Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) on Sinclair’s occult-inflected poetic geographies of London. Examining his creative exchanges with other writers, including Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore, it explores the coterie atmosphere of Sinclair’s early work before going on to navigate his increasingly venomous and toxic vision of East London and the Thames Estuary in the period spanning 1970 to 1994, adumbrating and critiquing the parallel development of what Patrick Wright has called the ‘acid negativity’ of Sinclair’s prose.Less
Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) on Sinclair’s occult-inflected poetic geographies of London. Examining his creative exchanges with other writers, including Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore, it explores the coterie atmosphere of Sinclair’s early work before going on to navigate his increasingly venomous and toxic vision of East London and the Thames Estuary in the period spanning 1970 to 1994, adumbrating and critiquing the parallel development of what Patrick Wright has called the ‘acid negativity’ of Sinclair’s prose.
