Into the Melée: Selected Essays

＂Francis Mulhern probes the mercurial relationship between culture and politics through versatile critical writing on Conrad, Orwell, Sartre, Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz, among others. Asserting that there is no position for critics situated above the fray of political life, Mulhern examines questions of nationality, from F. R. Leavis’s efforts to assert an English literary subject to Tom Nairn’s political vision of England and Scotland ’after Britain’. Other essays concern intellectuals and, in one way or another, the politics of revolution and counterrevolution, from Burke to the present. The book closes with a portrait of the New York magazine n+1 as heir to the militant traditions of Partisan Review＂--

Francis Mulhern (born 1952) comes from Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. His books include Figures of Catastrophe, Culture/Metaculture and The Moment of ’Scrutiny. He lives in London and is Associate Editor at New Left Review.