Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction

This book aims to revolutionize Larkin studies by releasing his oeuvre from the biographical approach adopted by his champions and detractors alike. Both camps have conspired to substitute a poet of certitude, even to the point of bigotry, for an author who is actually the contemporary master of undecidability. His novels and poems sabotage conventional pieties regarding church, state, nationality, marriage, gender, race and capital; and in the process, play a central role in the cultural transition to postmodernist indeterminacy.