Late Style and its Discontents

Gordon McMullan is Professor of English at King's College London and Director of the London Shakespeare Center. He is a critic and an editor with a focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama. He is a general editor of the Arden Early Modern Drama series and author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death.


Sam Smiles is an art historian at the University of Exeter. His research is focused primarily on British art and especially on the career of JMW Turner. He is curating a major exhibition at Tate Britain on Turner's last works and completing a book on the same subject.

Introduction: Late Style and its Discontents, Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles
Part one: Lateness, History, Modernity
1. From Titian to Impressionism: The Genealogy of Late Style, Sam Smiles
2. The 'Strangeness' of George Oppen: Criticism, Modernity, and the Conditions of Late Style, Gordon McMullan
Part two: Lateness and the Life Course
3. Historicizing Late Style as a Discourse of Reception, Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon
4. Making Darwin Late: Later Life and Style in Evolutionary Writing and its Contexts, David Amigoni
5. In the Antechamber of Death: Picasso's Later Paintings, Jeremy Lewison
6. The 'Late Styles' of Gioachino Rossini, Philip Gossett
7. Saving Schubert: the Evasions of Late Style, Laura Tunbridge
8. Perceptions of Lateness: Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and D. H. Lawrence, Michael Bell
Part four: The Time and Place of Lateness
10. Suffering Sea-changes: Jane Austen's Afterlives and the Possibilities of a Late Style, Olivia Murphy
11. Ravel, Timeliness, and Late Style, Barbara L. Kelly
12. 'Anachronism': Michael Hamburger and the Time and Place of Late Work, Karen Leeder
Part five: Adorno, Lateness, History
13. Notes on Beethoven's Late Style, Michael Spitzer
14. The Infinity of Water Lilies: On Monet's Late Paintings, Bente Larsen
15. Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno, Robert Spencer
Afterword, Ben Hutchinson