Emerging Critics

Invented Lives is structured around a series of upheavals. The characters’ worlds change and they must decide whether to take a risk or keep their lives as close as they can to before.

It is like an inverted and far more complicated version of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle (in which two men bond over their rivalry for a female’s affection). What I keep seeing is variations on this: two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent, intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic; and then the added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps.

Women are sometimes portrayed in traditional domestic settings in Leunig’s drawings, but they are never confined to simple human giver roles, or if they are, they chafe against these power dynamics, consciously or unconsciously.

This image of a woman observed in public, her distraction a sign that she is somewhere else, too, is one that arises again and again in texts that have women contemplate the minds of other women.

The Middle Parts of Fortune is a novel that enables us to understand the bodily, material, and phenomenological aspects of war. It belongs to the age of literary modernism, yet its language and style owed much to Manning’s classicist tastes.

The questions Bishop and Robinson ask are linked: could these disasters have been prevented? But more importantly, how do we keep going?

Kofman focuses on the materiality of scars: how they come to be on the body, how they index pain and trauma, and how they define a person, whether they like it or not.

Laveau-Harvie has packed a lifetime of hurt, confusion and disorientation into this slim volume.

Both George-Allen and Lee are describing their experiences of realisation, of revelation, of feminist wonderment: that the way our culture has been built relies on the systemic mistrust of women.

Renowned in her lifetime for her emotionally intense and formally controlled modernist poetry, the sudden death of Iranian poet Forugh…