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"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shifts deftly
between history, politics, culture and literature to offer a
fascinating and provocative analysis of the marginalisation of the
North." Madeleine Bunting, author of Labours of Love: the Crisis of
Care An in-depth exploration of the importance of the North of
England in the modern era. The North Will Rise Again covers the
colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and
optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of
failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West’s
most impoverished regions. By telling the story of the North in the
last few decades, Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big
questions at the forefront of British politics and society today,
touching on live issues including the North/South divide,
austerity, the impact of Brexit, the collapse of Labour’s ‘Red
Wall’, and calls for regional devolution. He concludes with a
powerful argument for a revival of northern politics and society by
way of what he calls ‘radical regionalism’. A native Northerner
himself, having returned to his home city of Newcastle with his
family in the last few years, Alex also includes elements of memoir
and stories from his own family history to reflect some of the key
arguments of his book. To what extent are the crises of the last
ten years partly the result of fundamental divides and inequalities
in the geography of England? How did the North become a place of
lost potential and broken dreams? And what can be done to make it
one of the most dynamic and forward-looking places in the world
once again? Niven considers all these questions and more in this
lively and highly topical book.
An in-depth exploration of the importance of the North of England
in the modern era. The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful
adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that
defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and
despair that is at the heart of one of the West's most impoverished
regions. By telling the story of the North in the last few decades,
Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big questions at the
forefront of British politics and society today, touching on live
issues including the North/South divide, austerity, the impact of
Brexit, the collapse of Labour's 'Red Wall', and calls for regional
devolution. He concludes with a powerful argument for a revival of
northern politics and society by way of what he calls 'radical
regionalism'. A native Northerner himself, having returned to his
home city of Newcastle with his family in the last few years, Alex
also includes elements of memoir and stories from his own family
history to reflect some of the key arguments of his book. To what
extent are the crises of the last ten years partly the result of
fundamental divides and inequalities in the geography of England?
How did the North become a place of lost potential and broken
dreams? And what can be done to make it one of the most dynamic and
forward-looking places in the world once again? Niven considers all
these questions and more in this lively and highly topical book.
An edition of the letters of the poet Basil Bunting (1900-1985).
This is a long-awaited first selected edition of the letters of
Basil Bunting, one of the major modernist poets of the twentieth
century. It includes a large portion of Bunting's correspondence
(around 200 letters) to recipients including Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, Harriet Monroe, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Ted
Hughes, George Oppen, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Davie, and Tom
Pickard. Following Bunting from his first encounters with major
literary figures in London and Paris in the 1920s to his death in
Northumberland in 1985, this selection showcases a narrative that
is crucial to the history of modernism and modern poetry in
English. Highlights include a long and detailed dialogue with Ezra
Pound in the 1930s on political, economic, and literary subjects, a
rich, ruminative exchange with the American poet Louis Zukoksfy
lasting over four decades, and various accounts of the excitements
and controversies of the Anglo-American poetry scene of the 60s and
70s. Whether Bunting is writing from New York at the height of the
Depression, Iran in the aftermath of World War II, or the north of
England during preparation of his masterpiece Briggflatts (1966),
his prose is unfailingly sharp, eloquent, entertaining, and
caustic. This edition contains detailed annotations of Bunting's
letters, a critical introduction, glossary of names, and an
editorial commentary.
Writing in Manchester in the years 1992-93, in a context in which
the depression of social marginalisation was palliated by a culture
of radical hedonism and belligerence, Noel Gallagher composed a
series of songs that distilled the spirit of the age far better
than the more usually celebrated Kurt Cobain. Gallagher's lyrics on
Definitely Maybe offered a message of affirmation and hope that was
couched in language of remarkable clarity and directness. As
Gallagher would later put it, Cobain had everything, and was
miserable about it. And we had fuck-all, and I still thought that
getting up in the morning was the greatest fucking thing ever,
because you didn't know where you'd end up at night. In an era in
which deconstructive cynicism was threatening the very existence of
the counterculture and the mainstream Left, Oasis offered a
radical, anomalous vision of positivity. And the fact this was
indisputably a working-class vision founded in solidarity and
fraternity was incredibly important.To a post-Thatcherite Britain
that had just undergone the most debilitating period of social
upheaval in a century, Gallagher ventriloquised slogans of burning
communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and
the playing of the other Oasis everymen, Paul McGuigan, Paul
Arthurs, and Tony McCarroll. The sheer elemental energy of
Gallagher's idealism was breathtaking. Alex Niven charts the
astonishing rise of Oasis in 1993 and 1994 and celebrates the
life-affirming, communal force of songs such as Live Forever,
Supersonic, and Cigarettes & Alcohol, and in doing so, he seeks
to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers.
In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic
hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness.
Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern
English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed
out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an
abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter
of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally,
extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically
lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry.
From Orwell-reading centrists to right-wing extremists, there have
been countless attempts in recent decades to reimagine the feudal
nation that was once England. But there is a strong case for saying
that `England' doesn't exist at all in the twenty-first century.
New Model Island examines a disparate range of cultural
references-the late Mark Fisher, Dylan Thomas, Alton Towers,
Northumbrian activism and Catholic Marxism-as it seeks to reimagine
the architecture of the British Isles in the context of the
energetic socialist revival of the moment. Part utopian memoir,
part elegy for the 2010s, New Model Island is an impassioned call
for a new kind of dreaming about post-national identity in a
post-capitalist future.
For David Cameron and 'Big Society' Tories, folk culture means
organic food, nu-folk pop music, and pastoral myths of Englishness.
Meanwhile, postmodern liberal culture teaches us that talking about
a singular 'folk' is reductive at best, neo-fascist at worst. But
what is being held in check by this consensus against the
possibility of a unified, oppositional, populist identity taking
root in modern Britain? Folk Opposition explores a renewed
contemporary divide between rulers and ruled, between a powerful
elite and a disempowered populace. Using a series of examples, from
folk music to football supporters' trusts, from Raoul Moat to
Ridley Scott, it argues that anti-establishment populism remains a
powerful force in British culture, asserting that the left must
recapture this cultural territory from the far right and begin to
rebuild democratic representation from the bottom up.
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