Patrick McGuinness

This is a study of one of theatre's quietest but most radical innovators. The playwright, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) has been called the prodigal father of the Theatre of the Absurd. Admired by writers as diverse as Mallarmé and Yeats, Artaud and Strindberg, Chekhov and Jarry, Maeterlinck was the most celebrated avant-garde playwright of his day. By 1900 he had given theatre a new set of bearings: 'static theatre', 'the theatre of the unexpressed', and 'the tragic of the everyday'. He had, according to Rilke, relocated theatre's centre of gravity, replacing action with inaction, events with the eventless, and dialogue with a semantics of silence as expressive as any of Symbolism's most sophisticated poetic constructions. The author of the supreme Symbolist play, Pelléas and Mélisande, and of haunting, minimalist dramas of waiting (L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, Intérieur), Maeterlinck laid the foundations for the most revolutionary theatre of the twentieth century. Opening with a chapter on Maeterlinck's Symbolist and decadent beginnings, and proceeding by way of comparative readings of Maeterlinck and contemporary Symbolist dramatic theory (with particular attention to Mallarmé), Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre provides close readings of the one-act plays, and his seminal theories of static theatre and the theatre of waiting.

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd'SUNDAY TIMESIn Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall. The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed:It's the anniversary of my mother's death,and it's my mother's birthday -the day she short-circuited the tenses,made the current flow both ways. A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

An important study of the work of Felix Vallotton, a prominent member of Les Nabis and a contemporary of Bonnard and Vuillard. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 30 June - 29 September 2019, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29 October 2019 - 26 January 2020. The Swiss artist Felix Vallotton (1865-1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Closely associated with Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and a fellow member of the avant-garde group Les Nabis, Vallotton has nonetheless sometimes been overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career. Texts by leading authorities look at Vallotton's life, work and reception. Generously illustrated throughout with the finest exemplars of the artist's paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton's oeuvre that aims to re-evaluate his output and legacy, and includes works never seen in public before. Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with Fondation Felix Vallotton, Lausanne.

Real Oxford shows that there's more than dreaming spires and bicycles to the city. The grand buildings of the university are here, but Patrick McGuinness charts a personal history of the place which radiates into the suburbs and into the everyday of people's lives, past and present. Surprising, quirky, Real Oxford presents the city anew.

Ander is always watchful, but particularly now, because the man across the table is his former teacher - Michael Wolphram - whom he hasn't seen in nearly 30 years. As the novel proceeds, we watch Wolphram's media lynching as ex-pupils and colleagues line up to lie about him.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The period covers the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history, and culture, the period was no less dramatic, with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of Action française. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the école romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name) and the far-right cultural politics of Action française in the early twentieth century. It also redefines many of the debates about late nineteenth-century French poetry by complicating the political engagement of the Symbolists in an era when the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period. The famous line by Péguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarmé and ends in Maurras.

The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most important themes in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative writing explores how the interplay between the given and the imagined, the real and the virtual, the world as we find it and the world as we make it, functions as a generative matrix for literary experimentation. Each contributor considers the question of attention, and explores how attending to something - a text, a place, a moment, a detail - creates and transforms both perceiver and perceived. Drawing together analyses of diverse literary movements - Surrealism, new autobiographical forms, le nouveau roman, the everyday, contemporary poetics, anthropology, urbanism and flanerie - this volume invites us to make new connections between many well-established themes. Critical thinking by renowned scholars appears alongside poetry and prose by leading writers from France and Britain, forging new relationships between scholarly and creative practices, and challenging us to cross the border between the two.

Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France explores the relations between poetry and politics in France in the last decade of the 19th century. The period covers perhaps the most important developments in modern French poetry: from the post-Commune climate that spawned the 'decadent' movement, through to the (allegedly) ivory-towered aestheticism of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. In terms of French politics, history and culture, the period was no less dramatic with the legacy of the Commune, the political and financial instability that followed, the anarchist campaigns, the Dreyfus affair, and the growth of 'Action française'. Patrick McGuinness argues that the anarchist politics of many Symbolist poets is a reaction to their own isolation, and to poetry's anxious relations with the public: too 'difficult' be be widely read, Symbolist poets react to the loss of poetry's centrality among the arts by delegating their radicalism to prose: they can call, in prose, for the overthrow of the state and support anarchist bombers, while at the same time writing poems about dribbling fountains and dazzling sunsets for each other. This study demonstrates the connections between the anti-Symbolist reaction of the école romane of 1891 (in which Charles Maurras first made his name), and the far-right cultural politics of Action française in the early 20th century. It also redefines many of the debates about late 19th-century French poetry by putting an argument forward for the political engagement(s) of the Symbolists while the French 'intellectuel' as a national icon was being forged. McGuinness insists on profound continuities between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th in terms of cultural politics, literary debate, and poetic theory, and shows how politics is to be found in unexpected ways in the least political-seeming literature of the period. The famous line by Péguy, that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics, has an appealing sweep and grace. This book has its own more modest and specific version of a similar journey: it begins in Mallarmé and ends in Maurras.

Takes you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. This book offers exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people's countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

The poems in "Jilted City" inhabit in-between-places, when a border is being crossed, a word is slipping into another language, when memory is translating loss. From 'Stations where the train doesn't stop' in 'Blue Guide', following a train journey through Belgium, to 'City of Lost Walks', English versions of a dissident Romanian poet whose 'poetry fails to register except in the form of an omission', McGuinness explores transition and translation, the afterlife of absences. Wit and paradox are at the heart of a collection that finds unforeseen connections between place and displacement.