Into the Melee collects Francis Mulhern’s insightful critical writing, much of it in the hybrid literary form that Bagehot described as ‘the review-like essay and the essay-like review’. It opens with questions of nationality, from F. R. Leavis’s efforts to assert a normatively English literary subject and Ferdinand Mount’s exploration of English cultural landscapes to Tom Nairn’s political vision of England and Scotland ‘after Britain’ and Joe Cleary’s account of Irish modernism. Another cluster of texts concerns intellectuals and, in one way or another, the politics of revolution and counter-revolution, from Burke to the present. There is an updated sketch of the magazine n +1 as heir to the militant traditions of Partisan Review. What is literature? Sartre’s answer was: committed literature. The writer as such was of the left. But culture and politics are discrepant practices, inhabiting one another in permanent tension. In its embrace of provisionality and its magpie curiosity, Mulhern observes, the essay is a mode especially well suited to the purposes of a Marxist criticism morally committed to the value of being surprised.
