"Cambridge Literary Review 11" (2018)

A book-sized magazine. The title is "Manifesto" though I don't think all the pieces try to stick to the theme. And some of the interpretations are playful, at best. The language is sometimes very turgid in a lit-crit essay way. Maybe that's intentional self-parody. Maybe the odd piece is computer-generated.

Isabel Warner asks "Why are queerness and experimentation thriving in British poetry and the other arts, and not in fiction?", suggeting that the way grants were targeted supplies the answer.

Victoria Brown and Richard Brammer's "Dostoyevsky Wannabee Manifesto" has the traditional form - numbered points - though the 99 points (Witty or pretentious/silly?) are more random than a real manifesto's - e.g.

• 26. Object orientated high computer programming languages must be given up at intermediate level due to a lack of verbs and too many nouns
• 99. A ninety-nine point manifesto risks an alienated reader

Isabel Waidner's piece interestingly mentions that "Outlining a dead body with chalk or high visibility tape has never been part of official police procedure. But ... real-life police officers have started actually to enact the popular trope. ... The first time an outline of a body was shown on a television series was in the 1958 Perry Mason episode The Case Of The Perjured Parrot"

Lee Ann Brown and Norman Fischer's piece includes "Examples of the prescient powers of poetry include the fact that it is a religion so fundamental that no one will admit it is has relish on it". I suspect that "admit it is has" should be "admit it has", but all the same, not an easy read.

Jonty Tiplady's piece borrows the manifesto form. It includes

I.I.I.2. The absence of the end of the poem (general equivocation as the atmosphere of the literary object) accounts for the illusion of the infinite which arises from the experience of the poem even while the experience is finite. Indeed the diacritical structure of language by which a lineal part of the poem points to another {X1 - X2 -X3} accounts for the very recursiveness of the poem, the fact that last words cannot be said - which is poetic ideology itself

Katy Deepwell's piece is a useful summary of feminist art manifestos, mentioning that "Feminism has had its own internal debates since 1968 about whether it is another avant-garde movement".