FRANCIS HUTTON-WILLIAMS
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
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[In progress]: Owning Error: The Reformation of the Reader in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Joyce’s Dubliners, which draws upon the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics and the reader-response strategies of Hans Jauss, Stanley Fish and Margot Norris to carry on unfinished meanings and place the reader on trial.
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Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde (Cork University Press, 2019)
Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde speaks to current interest in rethinking the first 100 years of Irish statehood. Its engaging debates query accepted or official forms of national identity and demonstrate through patient elaboration how MacGreevy and his circle moved the nation forward into a new age of politics, thought and feeling. On the one hand, the book contributes to the burgeoning interest in MacGreevy himself, a figure whose remarkable array of contacts and friendships include Éamon de Valera, Paul Valéry, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, Mainie Jellett and Jack Yeats. On the other hand, it contributes to growing interest in avant-garde and nationalist movements. Overall, it makes a vigorous case for why MacGreevy and his circle matter, not only as a historical curiosity, but in terms of our understanding of contemporary Irish culture.
The book’s attention to social networks brings alive the bruising encounters between Irish avant-gardists and their adversaries, as does its assured handling of drafts, letters and other archival materials, giving additional resonance to these debates. Especially valuable are the close readings of individually significant poems and paintings that shed new insight on the issue of cultural representation. These readings add much to our understanding of the vexed and deeply charged connections between art and nationalism. Although it necessarily assumes an informed audience with an interest in questions like the avant-garde or the politics of culture, the book furnishes succinctly and effectively the conceptual and historical context needed to understand its arguments. It features a useful chronology as part of its prefatory material, hundreds of endnotes that support further discussion, and ten vivid illustrations that allow the reader full immersion in visual masterpieces.
Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde will benefit scholars and students of Irish Studies, international modernism and postcolonial literature. It will also find an audience among Irish art historians and students of twentieth-century art.
ARTICLES
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‘Against Irish Modernism: Towards an Irish Experimental Poetry’, Irish University Review, 46.1, Special Issue on Irish Experimental Poetry, ed. David Lloyd and John Brannigan (Edinburgh University Press, 2016): 20-37 [8,000 words]
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‘Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman’s “text-music tandem” in Words and Music’, Modernist Cultures, 8.1, Special Issue on Musicality and Modernist Form, ed. Nathan Waddell and David James (Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 100-119 [8,500 words]
CHAPTERS
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‘The Other Dublin: London Revisited, 1925-27’, The Life and Work of Thomas McGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, ed. Susan Schreibman (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 141-153 [5,000 words]
REVIEWS
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‘Beckett and the Visual Turn: Two Approaches’, Re: David Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. xii + 252, 13 b/w illus., 49 colour illus. (hbk / e-book); and Julie Bates, Beckett’s Art of Salvage: Writing and Material Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. x + 234, 10 b/w illus. (hbk / e-book); Textual Practice, 31, 7 (Taylor & Francis) (21/09/2017) [3,000 words]
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‘Ministers of the Imagination’, Re: European Voices in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill (bilingual edition), ed. Ineke Bockting, Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, Elizabeth Muller, pp. vii + 172 (Peter Lang, 2015), Journal of the International Yeats Society, inaugural issue, ‘A Writer Young and Old: Yeats at 150’ (Liverpool / Clemson University Press, 2016) [3,000 words]
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Re: Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds, pp. xii + 202 (OUP 2012) in Notes and Queries (Oxford University Press) (30/06/2015): 483-4 [1,000 words]
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/3/483.short?rss=1
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‘Miracle of Thought in Flesh’, Re: Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts, pp. 304 (London: Hutchinson, 2012), Review 31 (Winter 2012) [1,500 words]
http://review31.co.uk/article/view/93/miracle-of-thought-in-flesh
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‘Pulverizing the Pretty Charlock’, Re: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. 2, 1941-56, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, pp. xciii + 886 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Oxonian Review, 17, 3 (14/11/2011) [2,000 words]
http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/pulverizing-the-pretty-charlock-with-weedone/