New Release Books by Andrew Hodgson

At the heart of this book is a belief that poetry matters, and that it enables us to enjoy and understand life. In this accessible guide, Andrew Hodgson equips the reader for the challenging and rewarding experience of unlocking poetry, considering the key questions about language, technique, feeling and subject matter which illuminate what a poem has to say. In a lucid and sympathetic manner, he considers a diverse range of poets writing in English to demonstrate how their work enlarges our perception of ourselves and our world. The process of independent research is modeled step-by-step, as the guide shows where to start, how to develop ideas, and how to draw conclusions. Providing guidance on how to plan, organise and write essays, close readings and commentaries, from initial annotation to final editing, this book will provide you with the confidence to discover and express your own personal response to poetry.

This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.

Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed – or perhaps malformed – the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies'' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take – books in boxes; of spare pages to be shuffled at the reader''s will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

"The ladies and gentlemen in this book are lost in translation. Some of them are recognized outranspians (since I recognized them). If oulipians are ''les rats qui construisent le labyrinthe dont ils se proposent de sortir, '' the works that comprise this book, the writers that generated them ''sont perdus dans Babel sans idée d''en sortir.'' A decisive and entertaining way of tilting at the windmills of a number of different languages." - Paul Fournel DW does Paris. This collection approaches the theme of interacting/interactions with language(s) that, across the contributors who are French speakers, English speakers, English/French speakers, has developed in myriad diverging ways. Impossible translation, engine translation, dictionary work, ''resistant reading''; text as physical medium. Also artistic discourse on language itself, what it''s for, what it does; how it forms us, how it perhaps constrains us. As too interactions with it in life and everyday settings, how it might get in the way, or fall apart, help or hinder. With, among the contributors, writers of prose, essay, poetry alongside conceptual artists, as too members of the Oulipo and Outranspo, DW Paris is a diverse showcase of Paris-centred experimental and innovative literature in 2019. Parisis edited by Andrew Hodgson, and contains contributions by: Camille Bloomfield, Amalie Brandt, Chris Clarke, Gaia Di Lorenzo, Craig Dworkin, Lauren Elkin, Andrew Gallix, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Stewart Home, Ian Monk, Yelena Moskovich, Olivier Salon, Philipp Timischl. "Paris est tout à fait excitant et original: il explore des voies et fait entendre des voix nouvelles et inattendues." - Marcel Bénabou

''Here is a larva, lost in a midsummer night''s Babel; one of Robbe-Grillet''s detective cyphers is wearing a Pnin suit; its name is Andrew; lost in a jaunty text without a contraption; waiting like a background process.'' --John Trefry''With masterful choreography, Hodgson makes interior complexity dance in Mnemic Symbols. Experience, memory, and narrative are caught in the act of synergism. If you ache for solidity, for a static truth to cleave to, for access to meanings buried deep within then--pinch yourself, baby--you''re alive. This book tells it like it is.'' --Rosie Snajdr

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

"Background: Sensory bias models of the evolution of sexually selected traits predict that trait preferences evolve in a nonsexual context such as prey selection. Indicator models predict that sexually selected traits indicate mate condition. I investigated the potential for sensory exploitation and condition indication models to explain the evolution of what appears to be a recently evolved sexually selected trait. Question: Did red pelvic spine coloration in male Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge (TNWR) brook stickleback (Cu!aea inconstans) evolve to exploit a preexisting sensory bias for red prey, thus helping males draw females to the nest? Or, did it evolve as an intersexual signal indicating male condition to females? Methods: I recorded the frequency of red pelvic spine coloration in males versus females and breeding versus non-breeding males. I measured the condition factor of males with and without red coloration on their pelvic spines. I presented fish with a paired choice between a red versus an orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple bead, and recorded the proportion of bites at each color. I tested for sexual dimorphism in pelvic spines and made observations on their use by territorial males in comparison to dorsal spines. Results: Red coloration is significantly more common in males than females and in breeding than nonbreeding males. TNWR brook stickleback prefer red to other colors in a predation context. Males with strongly red pelvic spines have a significantly higher mean condition factor than those with plain spines. Pelvic spine size is similar in males and females. Males tend to extend their dorsal spines more often than their pelvic spines during agonistic encounters. Conclusions: Red pelvic spine coloration of TNWR brook stickleback is a secondary sexual character which may exploit a preexisting sensory bias for red prey while also indicating condition to females"--Document.