Trent Editions Print

Framed with postcards from other writers and expert introductions, the collection reflects on the challenges of the twenty-first century moment. The book emerges from the innovative Re:Vision programme developed by the Critical Poetics research group at Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with the UNESCO Creative Cities network.Writing the Contemporary brings together the work of three European poets to explore themes of home, technology and environment.

Laura Riding is one of the great twentieth-century poets, but her poems have, until very recently, been little explored and understood. Love as Love, Death as Death (1928), her second collection, was composed after her move from New York to England in 1926, in the course of what was initially an intense love affair and remained a long-lasting literary partnership with Robert Graves.

ISBN 978-1-84233-165-1

Laura Riding is a major experimental interwar poet who first discovered and championed the writing of Gertrude Stein and whose work has strongly influenced others as diverse as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and John Ashbery. Her first collection, The Close Chaplet, was published in 1926 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and sets the scene for the rest of Riding’s work. This edition includes the poet’s first poetic manifesto, ‘A Prophecy or a Plea' (1925).

Poet: A Lying Word, Laura Riding’s penultimate collection of poems, was composed during 1930 and 1933 in the most settled period of her poetic career, during her astonishingly productive partnership with Robert Graves in Majorca.

A John Clare Flora
by M. M. Mahood

The Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864) knew and named more than 400 plant species in his poetry and prose, an 'astonishing tally', as Molly Mahood points out in her study of 'The Poet as Botanist'. Nor are these merely incidental mentions. Clare has been granted the very impressive total of more than 40 first county records for plants, as well as 65 for birds.

Beaumaris Bay and Other Poems by Richard Llwyd
Edited by Elizabeth Edwards

Richard Llwyd (1752-1835), a domestic servant turned poet and antiquarian, became one of Wales's best-known Romantic-period writers on the publication of 'Beaumaris Bay: A Poem' in 1800. Today almost forgotten, Llwyd was celebrated in his own time as the 'Bard of Snowdon', a poet whose depiction of North Wales's landscapes, literature and history came to define those spaces for later travellers to the region.

The Myth of the Last Taboo
Queer Subcultural Studies

Gregory Woods is Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1998), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. Five of his poetry collections have been published by Carcanet Press.

Edited by John Barrell and Timothy Whelan

Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson - Volume one.

Literary Memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson - Volume two.

The Person I Am by Laura (Riding) Jackson, Trent Editions, in Two Volumes

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962) was a working-class writer and socialist activist who fought to campaign for social and economic justice and the rights of working women.

The shipwreck narrative was a popular and prolific, if now largely forgotten, branch of Romantic-era print culture. Yet there are many fascinating and deeply moving accounts to be found in this voluminous literature. And just as importantly, the genre also offers a wealth of insights into a broad range of current academic debates. It was no accident or quirk of literary taste that shipwreck narratives were so popular in the Romantic period: they were compelling reading because in diverse ways they touched on some of the most important issues of the day. For a nation like Britain where military and economic power and even cultural identity were predicated on maritime prowess, shipwrecks were profoundly troubling events.

A Writer’s Daybook (2006) by Ronald Blythe. Trent Essays is an occasional series of commissioned volumes in which key practitioners write critically on aspects of creative writing and on other writers and their works. In A Writer’s Day-book Ronald Blythe, the eminent author of Akenfield, Divine Landscapes and many other notable titles, offers a lively selection from the ‘day-book’ of his reading and writing life, focusing on a wide range of writers who have inspired him, from Thomas Traherne to Virginia Woolf, Laurie Lee to Russell Hoban.

Harris’s Requiem (2006) By Stanley Middleton. Edited with an introduction by David Belbin, with the author's cooperation.
Thomas Harris is on the cusp of great success as a classical composer. But for every success he gets a knock back. This gripping, superbly crafted novel portrays the classical music world of the late fifties. It is Stanley Middleton’s second novel and his personal favourite.

Poems of Nancy Cunard, Ed. John Lucas
Cunard published four collections of her own poems and in 1943, at the suggestion of Edward Thompson (father of the historian E.P Thompson, and poetry editor for the publishers Benn), she began to assemble all the verse she wished to preserve, for an intended edition. Thompson died in 1944 and the typescript of the poems was left among his papers. These were eventually deposited at the Bodleian, and Cunard’s poems have been retrieved from this typescript by the kind permission of Dorothy Thompson, to form the text of the present edition.

Scripture Women (2005) By Rose Thurgood and Cicely Johnson. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Naomi Baker.
The introduction to the texts outlines the historical and cultural background of the women and their works, including a discussion of the relationship between the authors' social positions and the identities that they construct in their narratives. As well as making these striking accounts available in print for the first time, this edition also demonstrates some of the ways in which such life writings can inform our understanding of wider issues of class, gender, religion and identity in early modern England.

Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ By Shoshee Chunder Dutt.
One of the earliest Indian authors to publish fiction in English, Shoshee Chunder Dutt was a prolific essayist, poet, historian and novelist, and a perceptive social commentator. A member of the gifted Dutt family of Calcutta, his writing is a fascinating window on the colonial ‘contact zone’ of the early nineteenth century.

Ellen Wilkinson, the first woman Labour MP, is best remembered for leading a march of unemployed from her constituency to London in 1936. Her first novel Clash is set a decade earlier, during the General Strike and Miner’s Lock-out of 1926. Wilkinson was sent by the
TUC to tour the country in support of the strikers, and the book bears all the marks of her first-hand experience.

ISBN-10: 1842330691
ISBN-13: 978-1842330692

India Calling (2004) By Cornelia Sorabji. Edited by Elleke Boehmer and Naella Grew.
Cornelia Sorabji (1866 – 1954), the pioneering Indian lawyer and woman of letters, spent her life in a long struggle to open public institutions to women in India. She was the first woman to graduate from Bombay University and the first to be granted a B.C.L degree from the University of Oxford. As she records in her compelling autobiography India Calling (1932), Cornelia Sorabji worked for many years in imperial India as Ladies’ Legal Advisor representing women ‘behind the veil’. Parsee by background, yet ‘brought up English’, an imperial civil servant mistreated by the imperial bureaucracy, a pro-woman non-feminist, Cornelia Sorabji embodied some of the most powerful contradictions of empire of her time. India Calling is her powerful, path-breaking story.

In the Second Year (2004) By Storm Jameson. Edited by Sam Smith.
In the Second Year, originally published in 1936, offers a vivid premonition of a British fascist regime only five years in the future, modelling its narrative on the events of Hitler’s second year in power and his Night of the Long Knives. As much a critique of Britain in 1936 as a warning of what might still be averted by determined action, the novel is not however a political tract but an eminently readable work of fiction. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the interwar years, it is also, in the sheer power of its story-telling, an enthralling novel for the general reader, meriting comparison with such dystopian fictions as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome. Considered by Jameson to be her best work, In the Second Year is, quite simply, a very good novel.

Selected Writings of a Pioneer West African Feminist (2004) By Mabel Dove.
This book brings together for the first time an extensive selection of Mabel Dove’s journalistic and creative writing – work originally published in West African newspapers between 1931 and 1966. Mabel Dove (1905 – 1984) was one of the few female writers – and one of the first feminist thinkers – to produce newspaper articles on a regular basis in Ghana.

A Passion for Justice (2003)Edited by David Donnison. Spoken in Joe Kenyon’s gentle Barnesley accent, these stories of his life come out of a Yorkshire working-class oral tradition. Told to his wife, Irene, when she lay dying of cancer and typed up later, they are always vivid, poignant, enraging, uproarious – posing ever-relevant moral and political questions. His book is an invaluable source for all concerned with social, political history, and a genuine work of literature that will fascinate readers of all ages.

Selected Poems (2003) By Frank Thompson. Edited by Dorothy and Kate Thompson
This selection has been made by his niece and sister-in-law, neither of whom knew him in life. Frank Thompson, converted by Iris Murdoch to Communism on the eve of World War Two, and in letters to Iris, as well as to his brother and his parents, wrote about his deepest feelings while he was on active service in the war after volunteering; some of the poems in this collection are taken from a file of typed and manuscript versions which was among Iris's papers and which probably represents a selection he had made for her from his work.

Selected Poetry (2003) By Charles Churchill. Edited by Adam Rounce.
he satirist Charles Churchill (1731 – 64) published all of his poetry in a brief period between 1761 and his death three years later. His work was immensely popular from the time of his early death to the end of the eighteenth century, and Churchill’s admirers included William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, and Byron, who was influenced very clearly by his satires.

Starting to Explain: Essays on Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (2003) by John Lucas. Starting to Explain: Essays on Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry brings together work produced over the past twenty years.
Staring to Explain begins with a consideration of Hardy’s Wessex Poems and ends with an essay on contemporary anthropologies. In between some extended essays on poets D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Edgell Rickword, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Roy Fuller, W.S. Graham, Philip Larkin, Roy Fisher, Seamus Heaney and others, alongside more general pieces on such subjects as poetry and politics and jazz.

Tales for the Common People By Hannah More. Edited by Clare MacDonald Shaw.
Hannah More’s work, neglected for much of the twentieth century, is being critically evaluated. She gave the controversial title Tales for the Common People to a selection of her Cheap Repository Tracts, first published between 1795 and 1798 and distributed across the nation to more than two million people in a remarkable cultural experiment which was politically counter-revolutionary and morally radical. Fissures in her texts reveal creative conflict as she advocates the values of the prevailing ideology while seeking to modify them.

Exhibition Extraordinary!! (2001). Edited with an introduction, commentary and notes, by John Barrell. A new, witty and immensely inventive form of political propaganda in London in the mid-1970’s: a series of mock-advertisements and other public announcements which represented the activities of George III, of the government of William Pitt, and of the leaders of the British Army fighting the French Republic, as so many spectacles and entertainments: as plays, pantomimes, auction sales, art-exhibitions, ceremonial processions, and magic-shows.

Saving From The Wreck (2001) By Peter Porter.
Saving From The Wreck: Essays on Poetry brings together a number of Peter Porter’s critical essays on poetry. The essays, which started life as lectures, addresses, or in one instance a radio talk, range in subject matter from the Earl of Rochester through Pope, Christopher Smart, George Crabbe and Robert Browning to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and from meditations on poetry and music to the difficulties and rewards of translation. They are witty, deeply informed, fluently conversational and, as is to be expected, of unfailing interest to those concerned with the craft of poetry.

The ‘Centuries’ of Julia Palmer (2001) by Julia Palmer Edited by V.Burke and E. Clarke. Julia Palmer’s manuscript represents a very early collection of poetry by a middle-class, self-taught woman. These poems offer a full illustration of the idioms, doctrine and Biblical interpretation characteristic of Presbyterian Calvinism. They were written at a time of unprecedented religious and political activity, and are evidence of the reaction of the Nonconformist ‘middling sort’, whose resistance was so feared by the King and his ministers, to the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672.

Beats Bohemians and Intellectuals By Jim Burns
Expatriates in Paris in the 1920’s, radical writers in the 1930’s, New York Intellectuals in the 1940’s, Beat in the 1950: these are just some of the subjects covered in Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals.

Selected Poems (2000) by Randall Swingler. Edited with an introduction and notes, by Andy Croft. Swingler's poetry provides a unique record of his times, from the romantic Communism of the early thirties and the campaigning years of the Popular Front, through the war in Italy and the anti-Fascist victory of 1945 to the disappointed hopes of Cold War Europe. Bringing together his poetry for the first time, Selected Poems is an introduction to the work of an undeservedly-forgotten figure and a challenge to our understanding of a remarkable period of English literary history.

Selected Poetry and Prose (2000) By John Dyer.
The Anglo-Welsh poet John Dyer (1699 – 1757) is one of the great restless, enquiring figures of eighteenth-century British culture. A painter as well as a poet, he was a member of the talented Aaron Hill circle, and is sometimes described as the ‘godfather’ of the picturesque movement. His most famous poem Grongar Hill (1726), lovingly describes the Carmenthenshire landscape of his youth. After training asa painter under Jonathan Richardson in London, Dyer visited Italy, and went on to become a travelling painter in the Welsh-English border counties. He was later a working farmer, before serving as a parish priest in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire.

Hawthorne (1999) By Henry James. Edited with an introduction and notes, by Kate Fullbrook.
When first published in 1879 Hawthorne was attacked for its stress upon the provinciality of American culture and taste, which James represented as constraining Nathaniel Hawthorne. But if biography takes the form of a complex negotiation between the biographer’s self and the historical subject, then James’s treatment of Hawthorne serves as a fascinating delineation of his own literary and cultural self.
Hawthorne not only stands as an intriguing commentary by one important writer on another but also speaks tellingly about the self-conscious development of both American and modern culture. Hawthorne is famously depicted as an exquisite ‘romancer’ of ‘light and capricious’ intellect, whilst the Jamesian aesthetic self, in the form of the generous, amused, and tolerant narrative voice of Hawthorne, seeks to distance itself from his legacy, presuming its own cultural maturity.

Written by Patrick Hamilton, Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Peter Widdowson

ISBN 0 905 488 33 4

The Living Year 1841 (1999) by John Clare. 1841 was one of the most productive, varied and imaginatively moving periods of John Clare’s long poetic career. Against a background of asylum, escape home, and then forced removal to a second asylum, he wrote during this single year over 3,000 lines of original poetry and paraphrase, in addition to a substantial body of prose.

Our Nig (1998) by Harriet E. Wilson. Edited, with an introduction and notes by R. J. Ellis. First published in Boston in 1859, Our Nig, or, Sketches form the Life of a Free Black offers a harrowing portrait of the sadistic maltreatment of Alfrado, a young female African American bond servant. It shows how racism can infect the whole body politic and how enslavement can exist not just as a legally defined institution but also as an apparatus of social practices and norms, even in a slave-free State, namely Massachusetts. The novel thus shows how slavery can indeed exist in ‘freedom’.

The Croquet Player (1998) By H.G Wells
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by John Hammond
This is astonishing, given the extent to which this novella stands as a prescient forecast of the turmoil in Europe leading up to the start of World War Two and the events that happened in the war itself: 'little children killed in air-raids in the street'.

Save over 30%
Was £26.97 in total, now £17.97
Save £9

Save over 30%
Was £35.69 in total, now £23.96
Save £12

Save over 30%
Was £44.97 in total, now £28.97
Save £15