Introduction

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip. Yet his contemplative gaze almost never turns westward. He also refuses to produce a historical narrative of the area: here history is episodic, incoherent. Nor is Nicholson the poet of an `organic community'. He is rather a messianic poet for whom the coastal strip is an absolute boundary and spatial constraint. This forces the mind to think the impossible, vertical transaction, within which the idea of justice is crucial.

Andrew Gibson

Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London and a former Carole and Gordon Professor of Irish Literature at Northwestern University, Chicago. He is a member of the Conseil scientifique and the Comité de sélection of the Collège internationale de philosophie in Paris. His many publications include Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics, Aesthetics in `Ulysses' (Oxford, 2002), Samuel Beckett: A Critical Life (Reaktion and Chicago, 2010), Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2011) and The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Joyce's Writings 1898-1915 (Oxford, 2013).