Syllabus
Core readingThe works specified here are those intended for seminar discussion. Naturally, students will also benefit from exploratory reading beyond the listed items, especially since they will themselves be proposing their own topic for the term paper and are free to consider all or any works by Tony Harrison. A full Harrison bibliography (including relevant secondary works) will be handed out at the beginning of term.
From Selected Poems (Penguin, 1987)
- ‘Allotments’
- ‘The Nuptial Torches’
- ‘Newcastle is Peru’
- ‘Durham’
- ‘Ghosts: Some Words Before Breakfast’
- ‘On Not Being Milton’
- ‘Study’
- ‘Me Tarzan’
- ‘Wordlists’
- ‘Classics Society’
- ‘National Trust’
- ‘Them & [uz]’
- ‘Book Ends’
- ‘Long Distance’
- ‘Flood’
- ‘Aqua Mortis’
- ‘The Queen’s English’
- ‘Continuous’
- ‘Punchline’
- ‘Currants’
- ‘Changing at York’
- ‘Marked With D.’
- ‘Bringing Up’
- ‘Timer’
- ‘Fire-Eater’
- ‘Loving Memory’
- ‘Facing North’
- ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’
- ‘The Heartless Art’
- ‘The Lords of Life’
- ‘The Fire-Gap’
- ‘Following Pine’
- ‘Cypress and Cedar’
- ‘v.’
From The Gaze of the Gorgon (Bloodaxe, 1992)
- 'The Poetry Lesson'
- 'The Mother of the Muses'
- 'Initial Illumination'
- 'A Cold coming'
- 'The Gaze of the Gorgon. A Film Poem for BBC Television'
From Laureate's Block and other poems (Penguin, 2000)
- ‘A Celebratory Ode on the Abdication of Charles III’
- ‘Laureate’s Block’
- ‘The Cycles of Donji Vakuf’
- ‘Rice Paper Man’
- ‘Mouthfuls’
- ‘Fig on the Tyne’
Phaedra Britannica (after Racine) in Plays 2 (Faber, 2002)
The Common Chorus I and II (after Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Euripides’ The Trojan Women), in Plays 4 (Faber, 2002)
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (based on the extant fragments of Sophocles’ satyr play Ichneutae (‘The Trackers’), Faber, 1990)
Films (to be shown and discussed, but not prepared for seminar as core syllabus):
- v. (1987)
- The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992)
- Prometheus (1999)
Other works by Tony Harrison:
- Permanently Bard: Selected Poetry, ed. Carol Rutter (Bloodaxe, 1995)
- The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film poems (Faber, 1995)
- Square Rounds (Faber, 1992)
- Prometheus (Faber, 1998)
Secondary reading about Tony Harrison:
- Neil Astley (ed.), Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies: 1. Tony Harrison (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991)
- Sandie Byrne (ed.), Tony Harrison: Loiner (Oxford University Press, 1997)
- Sandie Byrne, H, v. and O: The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
- Joe Kelleher, Tony Harrison (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996)
- Luke Spencer, The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994)