The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughess proposition that every child is natures chance to correct cultures error. Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments political, as well as geographical which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live. 

 

Neil Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he organised the Seventh International Ted Hughes Conference in 2015. He has written numerous books about English Literature, especially modern poetry, includingTed Hughes: A Literary Life and A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove. His latest book isSons and Lovers:The Biography of a Novel.

Mark Wormald is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK. He was the co-editor, with Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, ofTed Hughes: from Cambridge to Collected (2013), and is the editor of the Ted Hughes Society Journal. His bookThe Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes will be published in 2019.

Terry Gifford is the author/editor/co-editor of seven books on Ted Hughes includingTed Hughes (2009),The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011),New Casebooks: Ted Hughes (2015) andTed Hughes in Context(2018). He is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University, UK and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.

 

1. Ted Hughes and the Environmental Humanities - Terry Gifford.- 2. 'The nuptial flight': Hughes and the Mayfly - Mark Wormald.- 3. Ted Hughes's Paradise - Neil Roberts.- 4. Why look at animals? - Danny O'Connor.- 5. Coetzee's Hughesian Animals - Claire Heaney.- 6. The Nature of Ted Hughes's Similes - James Castell.- 7. The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of Ted Hughes - Vidyan Ravinthiran.- 8. 'Imagination Alters Everything': Ted Hughes and Place - Janne Stigen Drangsholt.- 9. 'Our Chaucer': Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Politics of Medieval Reading - James Robinson.- 10. 'The Remains of Something': Ted Hughes and theMabinogi - Katherine Robinson.- 11. Ted Hughes's Apocalyptic Origins - John Goodby.- 12. Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations Contextually in Ted Hughes'sCave Birds - Carrie Smith.- 13. The Influence of Ted Hughes: the case of Alice Oswald - Laura Blomvall.- 14. Ted Hughes's Urbanity - Seamus Perry.