Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence

As the first full-length study of the work of Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence proposes a striking approach for reading the influences that interlace twentieth-century gay British writers. By focusing on the role of the textual image in literary influence, this book moves towards a new understanding of the interpenetration of literary and visual culture throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, this engaging new study illuminates the relationships between texts that are lost when influence is viewed as an anxious wish to triumph over the very history of images that an author has most loved and most powerfully re-awakened.

Allan Johnson is Assistant Professor in English at City University of Hong Kong. He has previously taught at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Leeds.

Introduction
1. Influence, Image, and the Movement of Time
2. Sun-Worship and the Idolatry of Images: Derek Jarman, Philip Glass, and The Swimming-Pool Library
3. 'The Poets of Our Time': Lateness and Pedagogical Influence in The Folding Star
4. 'Almost Always': Influence, Ecstasy, and Architectural Imagination in The Spel
5. Spitting Images: Image, Text, and the Popular Press in The Line of Beauty
6. 'The Latter Days Sortes Virgilianae': Confirmation Bias and the Image of the Poet in The Stranger's Child
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index