Abstract
Perhaps even more thoroughly than Hollinghurst’s earlier fiction, The Stranger’s Child absorbs and redistributes the visual vocabulary of modern gay writing in a process first observed when Joseph Bristow noted that The Swimming-Pool Library ‘[contrives] to produce a history that maps some of the cardinal shifts and transitions in gay men’s lives in the twentieth century’.1 The ‘history [of] gay men’s lives’ — as mapped out through Will Beckwith’s movements towards a fuller understanding of the past and his particular implications in it — becomes further complicated in The Stranger’s Child, a volume that, in many ways, complements and completes the thematic trajectory of Hollinghurst’s debut novel.
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Notes
Raymond Nickerson, ‘Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises’, Review of General Psychology, 2:2 (1998), pp. 175–220
Juliet Nicolson, The Great Silence: 1918–1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War (London: John Murray, 2009), pp. 119–21.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (1970; repr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 4.
Greg Graham-Smith, ‘Sexuality and the Multicursal Maze in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child’, Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 17:2 (2012), 7–12
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 1.
Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 17.
Glen Cavaliero, A Reading of E.M. Forster (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 105.
Margaret Matlin and David Stang, The Polly anna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978), p. 3.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch (London: Norton, 2001), pp. 1466–70
Gilbert Hartman, Changes in View: Principles of Reasoning (London: MIT Press, 1986), p. 7.
David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 13.
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© 2014 Allan Johnson
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Johnson, A. (2014). The Latterday Sortes Virgilianae: Confirmation Bias and the Image of the Poet in The Stranger’s Child. In: Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362032_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362032_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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