This groundbreaking, cross-generic collection is the first to consider the entire breadth of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning writing. Focused through the concept of influence, the volume addresses critical issues surrounding the work of Britain's most important contemporary novelist. It encompasses provocative and timely subjects ranging from gay visual cultures and representations, to Victorian, modernist and contemporary literature, as well as race and empire, theatre and cinema, eros and economics. The book reveals the fascinating intellectual and affective matter that lies beneath the polished control and dazzling style of Hollinghurst's work. Alongside contributions by distinguished British and American critics, the book includes an unpublished interview with Hollinghurst.

Alan Hollinghurst: Writing under the influence uses a creative range of critical approaches to provide the most authoritative and innovative account available of Hollinghurst's works.

Reviews

'Alan Hollinghurst is Britain's finest living novelist, and this volume brilliantly demonstrates why. Whether exploring his depictions of contemporary gay culture or teasing out his complex relations with precursors such as Ronald Firbank, E.M. Forster and Henry James, the essays assembled here do rich and rewarding justice to the 'line of beauty' that unfolds in Hollinghurst's wonderfully inventive writing.'
Mark Ford, University College London

Introduction: A dialogue on influence - Denis Flannery and Michèle Mendelssohn
1. Hollinghurst's poetry - Bernard O'Donoghue
2. The touch of reading in Hollinghurst's early prose - Angus Brown
3. Poetry, parody, porn and prose - Michèle Mendelssohn
4. Race, empire and The Swimming Pool Library - John McLeod
5. The Stranger's Child and The Aspern Papers: queering origin stories and questioning the visitable past - Julie Rivkin
6. Ostentatiously discreet: bisexual camp in The Stranger's Child - Joseph Ronan
7. Hollow auguries: eccentric genealogies in The Folding Star and The Spell - Robert L. Caserio
8. Some properties of fiction: value and fantasy in Hollinghurst's house of fiction - Geoff Gilbert
9. Cinema in the library - Alan O'Leary
10. Using Racine in 1990: or, translating theatre in time - Denis Flannery
11. 'Who are you? What the fuck are you doing here?': queer debates and contemporary connections - Kaye Mitchell
12. What can I say? Secrets in fiction and biography - Hermione Lee interviews Alan Hollinghurst
Index

Editors

Michèle Mendelssohn is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Deputy Director at the Rothermere American Institute

Denis Flannery is Associate Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Leeds