The canary in the coal mine: Tony Harrison and the poetics of coal, climate, and capital

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Thomas, David A. J.
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Tony Harrison's poetic studies of deindustrialised Yorkshire anticipate Jason Moore's eco-Marxist critique of the neoliberal energy economy. Critical discussion of Tony Harrison's poetry has focused on the characteristic stances and techniques by which the poet first established his canonical standing, essaying his uneasy class consciousness and explosive use of regional dialect. Precious little attention has been paid to the ecological concerns that have become an increasingly integral element of Harrison's work. In the long narrative poem v. (1984) Harrison responded to the hard-fought Miners’ Strike (1984–5), protesting the disenfranchisement of the British industrial working class. In some of v.’s more speculative lines, he countenanced the possibility of coal's eventual ‘exhaustion'. In the film poem Prometheus (1998), he appraised the Miners’ Strike from the distance of a decade, anchoring the poem in the perspective of a cancer-ridden coal miner. In the image of a dyi...
Starting Page	915
Ending Page	932
Page Count	18
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1080/0950236X.2015.1084369
Volume Number	30
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://worldecologynetwork.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/thomas-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine-tony-harrison-and-the-poetics-of-coal-climate-and-capital.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1084369
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article