Chapter 2 is a consideration of Carrington in the realm of fashion photography and performance art, leading to a discussion around cult status intersecting with pop culture. Tim Walker and Tilda Swinton (b.1960) summoned Leonora Carrington most potently in two iconic fashion stories, firstly for W Magazine (2013) then for i-D Magazine (2017). In these colourful and sumptuously upholstered scenes, with their eccentric perspectives, Swinton inhabits the irrational corners of the imagination, embodying the characters of Carrington’s visual narratives and borrowing from her distinctive iconography. Swinton portrays figures such as the medieval jester in Carrington’s painting Darvault (1950) and the robed creature in And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), among others. The overall effect is one of embodied storytelling, an intergenerational dialogue with Carrington as a medium to be working in and through. The sense of excess and abundance presented here is a contrast to a sparer, cooler aesthetics found in other facets of Swinton’s practice such as The Maybe (1995) where the actor displayed herself asleep in a vitrine. Swinton’s more recent curatorial projects are also considered, thus segueing into the next chapter.

This chapter introduces the salient features of Leonora Carrington’s esoteric art and writing. It unpacks the multiple meanings of the term “medium,” encompassing both its literal application (such as egg tempera paint) and its more poetic sensibility, both Carrington’s own interest in the occult as well as the idea of her work as a conduit for contemporary makers. This chapter uses an archaeological approach to Carrington’s key themes in order to mind her epistemologies or theories of knowledge. It considers her own extensive bibliographic sources such as children’s picture-book illustration as well as recurrent motifs with her work (e.g. the carousel horse, flying vehicles and dollhouse architecture).

This afterword summarises the book’s findings and argues that feminist movements can find strong allies in contemporary arts produced by men. The final focus is on Carrington’s compelling use of the feminist grotesque in Simphiwe Ndzube’s recent painting-assemblage As They Rode Along the Edge (2020) and China Miéville’s novella The Last Days of New Paris (2016). Both Ndzube and Miéville make explicit reference to Carrington’s wartime drawing I am an Amateur of Velocipedes (1941), whether collaging it into text or recycling the composition. Interestingly, both Ndzube and Miéville use examples of Carrington’s wartime output, and both use her characters as forms of exquisite corpse disguise, ultimately as acts of resistance to patriarchal landscapes. The afterword closes with a word of warning around misappropriation, namely David Cameron’s ill-advised visit to Magical Tales (2018).

While the prevailing trend in Carrington studies is around the dialogic and the collaborative, this chapter presents a case for creative solitude. It argues for nuance in the use of Carrington by focusing on two novelists. This chapter also takes a practical approach to the notion of fieldwork and eco-feminist research. Indeed, Carrington has much to offer current debates around the politics of balancing a creative practice with parenthood. The Canadian-Ukrainian writer and fashion designer, Heidi Sopinka (b.1971), recently published The Dictionary of Animal Languages (2018), a novel based on the Leonora Carrington narrative. Here, Carrington is reimagined as Ivory Frame, an animal painter turned biologist, now aged 92 and researching communication and ecology. Notions of creative solitude abound in this novel and chime with the Mexican, London-based writer Chloe Aridjis (b.1971), who similarly self-presents the benefits of introversion in her film with Josh Appignanesi, Female Human Animal (2018), as well as in her novelistic writing (2009, 2013, 2019). Carrington’s own notion of a “female human animal” (1970) is crucial to both writers, as such hybridity queries binary thinking.

Chapter 3 is an exploration of the intersection between esotericism and conceptual art which positions Carrington at its core. Here, the focus is on the Glasgow-based conceptual artist and Turner Prize nominee, Lucy Skaer (b.1975), who prepared a Leonora cycle (2006 and 2012) in which the curatorial possibilities of the Tarot were investigated. Skaer’s practice offers one of the most insightful inversions of Carrington. For anyone familiar with Skaer’s critically self-reflexive work on the nature of visuality and mixed-media approach to interrogating “the image,” her interest in a visual narrator like Carrington would perhaps initially strike one as surprising. Yet, since 2006, Skaer has claimed Carrington as a “disassembling logic,” a catalyst for being able to reconsider her own approach to art-making. The chapter draws on the author’s own curated exhibition Leonora Carrington/Lucy Skaer at Leeds Arts University (2016) as well as other installations of Skaer’s cycle.

This is a contextualising introduction to Leonora Carrington that surveys the landscape of her legacies, critical responses and fandom in a range of artistic media. I begin with the metaphor of the pilgrimage as a way into the current challenges of Carrington studies, and review the existing historiography on Carrington, justifying my understanding of quotation, my position “against influence” and “for intellectualism,” and use of a feminist-surrealist revisionary methodology, with close reference to avant-garde theorist Susan Rubin Suleiman (1990) and mythographer Marina Warner (1989), as well as discussion of more recent revisionary scholarship by Natalya Lusty (2007) and Anna Watz (2016). The introduction also provides a chapter outline for what follows.

Chapter 4 covers the period from the Civil War/War of Three Kingdoms to the Restoration. It argues that it is important that the Civil War is explored in terms of class conflict because of the varied and radical ideas that were generated, which either saw the war in terms of social strife, or, more frequently, saw it as an opportunity to eradicate such problems and establish or restore a more egalitarian order. The Levellers sought to establish new social and political principles that would facilitate equality. Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers attacked enclosure and the appropriation of the common land, hoping and believing that their social experiments would inaugurate a return to the values that had been lost since the Norman Conquest. Their Royalist opponents, Isaac Walton and Robert Herrick, shared the Diggers’ belief in the need for a common culture based on agrarian values, while urban radicals such as John Milton had a somewhat elastic representation of the ‘people’, one that elided thinking about class. John Bunyan was another critic of the commercialization of society and the disappearance of common rights and land. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the writings of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn. While Rochester is relatively thoughtful about gender differences, he is blind to issues of class. Behn desires the equality of the sexes in her erotic poetry, but a re-establishment of a hierarchical social order in her novel, Oronooko.

This chapter explores the fluid, adaptable nature of performance poetry and looks at potential responses to the disruption caused by the pandemic. The chapter documents the Nottingham spoken-word culture and positions it within wider debates about class, literary value and the physicality of the performance. I study the work of Michelle ‘Mother’ Hubbard – a Nottingham poet of dual Irish and Jamaican heritage – to understand how grassroots literature carves out its own spaces; how various forms of literary value are ascribed; and to examine the complex networks of gatekeepers and valuing communities which constitute contemporary performance poetry cultures in Nottingham. Poetry has often been the preserve of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, considered an exclusive form of high art which requires middle-class credentials, such as a degree education or Received Pronunciation, in order to gain access. This chapter uses the seismic disruption of COVID-19 to map a new, more egalitarian ‘public sphere’, in which democratic principles of curation and delivery enable increasingly broad and diverse audiences to access the art form.

Chapter 8 examines the extent to which Midlands writers such as Meera Syal, Sathnam Sanghera and Huma Qureshi have been read in a fetishising context for marketing purposes. The title quote ‘Pathos, politics and paratha’ appeared in The Telegraph in 2013 and was chosen here for its evocation of – and ultimately its deviation from – the ‘steelbands, saris and samosas’ cliché of a superficial kind of multiculturalism, particularly prevalent during the 1997–2001 period of New Labour governance in the UK. A celebratory mode of public discourse around multiculturalism at the time would elevate a select few Black and Asian voices into the literary mainstream. This chapter interrogates the legacy of so-called ‘3S multiculturalism’ by analysing how critical reviews have shifted their tone over time and whether these shifts mirror broader societal attitudes to multiculturalism. The chapter unpicks the entangled, fascinating relationships between the Midlands, its writers, the publishing industry, the book-buying public, and the multicultural identity politics at the core of British nationhood.

The Multicultural Midlands works with the theoretical models of postcolonial critics, while also challenging their relevance in everyday Midlands-specific literary contexts and offering new critical insights. In this vein, the book articulates the Midlands nuances of what James Procter calls ‘the postcolonial everyday’, an aesthetic mode found in literature, which not only privileges everyday people and situations but also demonstrates how absolutely compatible these quotidian frames of reference are with writing of Black British and Asian origin. The approach to textual selection and analysis resists the lure of what Huggan calls ‘The Postcolonial Exotic’. Huggan flags up this reductive yet widespread literary-economic practice whereby diversity ‘is manipulated for the purpose of channeling difference into areas where it can be attractively packaged and, at the same time, safely contained.’ This is what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls ‘3S’ multiculturalism: ‘steelbands, saris and samosas’. Exoticism, then, can be profitably disseminated to audiences who want a taste of diversity, while stopping short of absolute immersion. Midlands writing has no lack of diversity but – in keeping with the region’s underprivileged position both in relation to the national sense of geographical hierarchy and the economic realities of literary cultures outside of London – frequently deploys representational modes relating to the ordinary, the domestic and the everyday. These literary aesthetics are not the expression of a downtrodden community but rather the proud manifestation on paper of what it means to be a Midlander.

Chapter 7 explores how African Caribbean writers have written the urban landscape in original, political and often surreal ways. One creative response is to see within the surroundings an ‘elsewhere’ place of ancestral belonging: super-imposing layered images in a creative representation. This chapter explores poetry, art and music to better understand a Pan-African perspective on the Midlands articulated by Black creatives, from the 1970s to the twenty-first century. Alternative spatial conceptions of the inner city are unlocked through readings that interrogate how racism and colonialism have shaped Handsworth, and how the place has, in turn, birthed waves of globally recognised art.