Into the Melée

Know about the book -

Into the Melée is written by Francis Mulhern and published by Verso Books. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1804293342 (ISBN 10) and 9781804293348 (ISBN 13).

An essential collection of literary criticism from Francis Mulhern, author of The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ and Culture/Metaculture Into the Melée collects Francis Mulhern's insightful critical writing, much of it in the hybrid literary form that Bagehot described as 'the review-like essay and the essay-like review'. It opens with questions of nationality, from F. R. Leavis's efforts to assert a normatively English literary subject and Ferdinand Mount's exploration of English cultural landscapes to Tom Nairn's political vision of England and Scotland 'after Britain' and Joe Cleary's account of Irish modernism. Another cluster of texts concerns intellectuals and, in one way or another, the politics of revolution and counter-revolution, from Burke to the present. There is an updated sketch of the magazine n +1 as heir to the militant traditions of Partisan Review. What is literature? Sartre's answer was: committed literature. The writer as such was of the left. But culture and politics are discrepant practices, inhabiting one another in permanent tension. In its embrace of provisionality and its magpie curiosity, Mulhern observes, the essay is a mode especially well suited to the purposes of a Marxist criticism morally committed to the value of being surprised.