CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

Another good example of what I mean by the ‘Ironic culture’ of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries is T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, which some regard as the most important poem of the twentieth century. The Waste Land has been the subject of a great deal of critical analysis and scholarly interpretation, with many still arguing over ‘what it means’. But this is actually our first indication that we are dealing with an Ironic work: works of previous modes and other

I have asserted in earlier articles in this series that we are living in an Ironic Age. By that, I mean that there are various indications in the art, literature, film, theatre and other cultural expressions of our time that there has been a shift towards a focus on the ‘darker pole’. Myth tells us that from an initial Void there emerges a set of binary positions, commonly referred to as Light and Dark. What forms between these poles - i.e. everything that we know of as ‘the

In examining Great Expectations, what exactly should our thesis lead us to look for? The same kind of things that we have been finding all along: two poles, a set of archetypes, and a motion toward one of the poles. In Myth, the image presented is usually either of an eternal battle or balance between Light and Dark; in Romance, the forces of each are arrayed in terms of supernatural virtues and vices; in the High Mimetic, the same forces struggle with each other, often resul

I wanted to present a table to you which may be largely fanciful but could also be a way of summarising the scene so far: Northrop Frye’s division of fiction into several modes has in his work Anatomy of Criticism and elsewhere been most usually associated with time periods, more or less aligning to those given above. I have taken the additional step of correlating them with stages of growth, as shown, then these in turn broadly relate (I’m asserting) to the progression ou

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was a great Irish poet, and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He helped to found the Abbey Theatre and served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Born in Sandymount, Ireland, he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo, studying poetry from an early age. Irish legends and the occult feature in the first phase of his work. His earliest volume of lyrical poems was published in 1

Usually it is only in stories or dreams that we feel as though we have been journeying for a long time but realise that we are still in the same place. But this series of articles can have the same effect: we began by looking at Myth and the strange images and tales that spring from the hearts of cultures across the planet; then we examined Romance or Legend, the quests and superhuman accomplishments of larger-than-life figures, striding through magical landscapes. Shortly af

From the darkness come two poles, light and dark; between those poles archetypes form, moving into orbit around one pole or the other. In the gaps between, strange images (birds whose eggshells form the world, dew droplets combining to make reality, and so on) and non-sequiturs (from an ice-giant’s armpit comes the first man and woman, for example) roam unbridled. This is the zone of the Myth. As the light grows stronger, so the images become clarified: in the zone of Roman

Writing is a peculiar field, and one of its oddities is that its practitioners are permitted - even expected, in some cases - to present false identities to the world in the form of ‘pen names’. There are, I think, certain advantages to this. I can think of four: 1. Avoiding Negative Feedback This may be the one that many think of. If you’ve exposed your heart and soul in a piece of work, pouring out emotions which you have perhaps never shared with anyone and making th

From the Editor's Foreword of Vortex: The Inner Circle Writers' Group Literary Anthology 2018, available here: I’ve noticed a trend of questions recently in some writers’ groups regarding the definitions of ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction. Quite often, the starting point for such questions has been genre fiction, with science fiction, fantasy or romance writers and the like asking ‘What is literary fiction?’ Sometimes the answers have been misleading or a little shallow, so