Other Works

“...the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to connect more honestly and deeply with a region facing ongoing challenges and profound transformations. ”
— - Susan Kollin, Professor of English, Montana State University, USA
“Asquith expertly draws attention to the punishment of the ‘unwary’ - no one, he demonstrates, whether pioneer, rancher, cowboy, Indian, holiday-maker, Hollywood star or retiree, has the requisite qualities for a healthy relationship with Proulx’s Wyoming.”
— TLS
“One of the best books on Hardy published in recent years...”
— Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, UK

John Williams, as the New Yorker noted recently, was author of ‘the greatest American novel you’ve have never heard of.’ He died in obscurity but has enjoyed a literary renaissance due to the worldwide critical acclaim greeting recent reissues of his major novel Butcher’s Crossing, Augustus and particularly Stoner. With films of both Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner already in pre-production it is clear that Williams’ star is in the ascendant. This book is designed to offer a critical introduction to his writing. It is developed through solid scholarly research but is structured and written in a clear and direct style that makes it accessible for academics, students and general readers alike. It offers a clear sense of the novelist’s early life and work, which includes an evaluation of his academic life (he was a professor at the University of Denver) and neglected poetry. The bulk of the book is given over to readings of the three major novels: they offer an appreciation of Williams’ literary craft combined with an assessment of literary and cultural influences and an overview of contemporary critical reactions. Few authors have written such disparate works in terms of subject matter, genre and style, however they are all united in their effort to grapple with deeper existential questions. For whether his characters are riding the Western plains, speaking in the Roman Forum or reading in a dusty library, they all demonstrate Williams’ preoccupation with the ways in which youthful hopes and a strong sense of who we are shaped by life’s accidents. How we make the life meaningful, learn to love another human being, confront failure – these are the well points of Williams’ understated tragedies. Unfortunately, such meditations are rarely fashionable; but neither are they ever unfashionable. George Orwell observed that the only true critic is time: this study makes clear that Williams’ time has come.

Amazon

Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane

Lost in the New West investigates a group of writers – John Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Thomas McGuane – who have sought to explore the tensions inherent to the Western, where the distinctions between old and new, myth and reality, authenticity and sentimentality are frequently blurred. Collectively these authors demonstrate a deep-seated attachment to the landscape, people and values of the West and offer a critical appraisal of the dialogue between the contemporary West and its legacy.

Mark Asquith draws attention to the idealistic young men at the center of such works as Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960), McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) and Border Trilogy, Proulx's Wyoming stories and McGuane's Deadrock novels. For each writer, these characters struggle to come to terms with the difference between the suspect mythology of the West that shapes their identity and the reality that surrounds them. They are, in short, lost in the new West.

Bloomsbury Publishing

Thomas Hardy, Metaphysics and Music

This original and compelling study reveals that music is not a decorative flourish in the work of Thomas Hardy, but a key to its deepest meanings. It argues that an ear for Hardy’s musical allusions is essential to understanding both the philosophical reach of the novels and poems and, at times, the behaviour of the characters themselves. Countering the familiar image of Hardy as a “rural” novelist drifting between social satire, sensation, and pastoral reflection, Asquith places him at the centre of the Victorian intellectual world. Hardy appears here as a writer intensely engaged with the great questions of his age — evolution, free will, determinism, mesmerism, and aesthetics — using musical metaphor as a way of draw them together. Central to Hardy’s project is the way in which music was being dissected by Darwinian biology and its affective power analyzed by the emerging sciences of physiology and psychology. Music also occupied a privileged place in aesthetic theory, from Walter Pater’s famous claim that all art aspires to the condition of music, to its expression in Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimism and its dramatic realization in the works of Richard Wagner. By bringing these strands together, Asquith offers striking new readings of Hardy’s fiction and poetry, showing how music and musical form shape his portrayal of consciousness, freedom, and the transmission of feeling. This is Hardy as we have not heard him before.

Amazon

Reading the novels of John Williams: A flaw of light

The Lost Frontier

Annie Proulx is one of the most provocative and stylistically innovative writers in America today. She is at her best in the short story format, and the best of these are to be found in her Wyoming trilogy, in which she turns her eye on America's West-both past and present.

Yet despite the vast amount of print expended reviewing her books, there has been nothing published on the Wyoming Stories. The Lost Frontier fills this critical void by offering a detailed examination of the key stories in the trilogy: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way it Is (2008). The chapters are arranged according to western archetypes-the Pioneer, Rancher, Cowboy, Indian, and, arguably, the most important character of them all in Proulx's fiction: Landscape.

The Lost Frontier offers students a clear sense of the novelist's early life and work, her stylistic influences and the characteristics of her fiction and an understanding of where the Wyoming Stories, and Annie Proulx's work as a whole, fits into traditional and contemporary writing about the American West.

Bloomsbury Publishing

Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain and Postcards

This guide to Annie Proulx's novel Postcards and her short story Brokeback Mountain features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the texts, a summary of the their popular and critical reception, a discussion of the recent film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain and its reception and a great deal more. If you are studying either text, reading them for your book club, or if you simply want to know more, you'll find this guide informative, intelligent, and helpful.

Bloomsbury Publishing

  • Employing the critical prism of four exemplary writers, this well-researched, engaging and perceptive book analyses the long shadow cast by the Western, tracing its multiple meanings, varied perspectives and consistently surprising reinventions. Reading Lost in the West both reminds us of the genre’s tenacious survival and its ageless significance.

     - Neil Campbell, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, University of Derby, UK

  • This astutely focused study launches readers into a blazing metaphysical search for the essence of the American West, a place at once geographic and mythical, a 'portable signifier' as Asquith puts it, both imaginary and brutally real. Asquith excels especially in drawing thoughtful and unexpected connections between books as seemingly dissimilar as That Old Ace in the Hole and Blood Meridian or picking out delightfully surprising threads running between Emerson’s transparent eyeball, the restrained prose of John Williams and the exuberantly gothic postmodernism of Cormac McCarthy. If we are lost in the New West, this book is a suggestion to continue wandering.

    - Sara Spurgeon, Professor of Literatures of the American Southwest, Texas Tech University, USA

  • A beautifully written and timely book, Lost in the New West is an impressive guide through the literature of a vibrant and ever-changing American landscape. Mark Asquith offers a fresh approach to understanding the work of recent western authors who seek to move beyond damaging myths of place and nation. In this way, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to connect more honestly and deeply with a region facing ongoing challenges and profound transformations.

    - Susan Kollin, Professor of English, Montana State University, USA

  • Peeling back layer after delicate layer, Asquith situates Proulx's work within traditions of American fiction, nature writing, regionalism, and the continuing American obsession with the frontier. The prose here is both beautiful and deliciously sharp, and Asquith excels in providing remarkable insight into the development of the female voice in Proulx's Western fiction, of the troubled relationships she imagines between men and their myths, and her frequently overlooked engagement with Native people and their relationships to the land, their white neighbours, and each other.

    — Sara Spurgeon, Associate Professor of English, Texas Tech University, USA

  • Throughout the book, Mark Asquith illustrates how the 'crushing' mythology - 'the tension between myth and people struggling to live up to that myth' - is the focus of much of Proulx's work. In expressive prose, that effectively counterbalances Proulx's mimicking of Wyoming's elliptical speech patterns, Asquith's comprehensive analysis shows 'the existential difficulties' experienced by Proulx's characters. [...] Asquith expertly draws attention to the punishment of the 'unwary' - no one, he demonstrates, whether pioneer, rancher, cowboy, Indian, holiday-maker, Hollywood star or retiree, has the requisite qualities for a healthy relationship with Proulx's Wyoming.

    - TLS

  • One of the best books on Hardy published in recent years...I was struck by how coherent, well-illustrated and informative it is, opening up a world of musicological debate and making sense of it; relating it to the way that the nineteenth century thought about emotion, embodiment and their transmission; and of course applying it in numerous incisive ways to a range of Hardy's work, taking in issues including the Darwinian landscape, social life, courtship and the chorus...An impressive and elegant book.

    - Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, UK

  • The range of discussion, originality of perception and assimilation of ideas is impressive. This book will be of considerable use to all Hardy scholars: the musicological debate is lucid; the exploration of nineteenth-century society and culture is informative and enlightening; and the application of “concepts” and “ideas” through incisive analyses of Hardy's novels is impressively focussed and illustrative. Through Asquith's study of music in the novels, from its primarily decorative function in Far from the Madding Crowd to its status as the central allusive device in the tragic vision of the later novels, an innovative and experimental Hardy emerges.

    - Anonymous Review The Hardy Society Journal, 2006