Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer

Critics have labelled Larkins poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkins artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study, originally published in hardcover in 2004 (now available in paperback), makes available to scholars paintings by Larkins friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writers concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer is a fresh and revealing study on Larkins artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkins entire oeuvre.