Derek Jarman wrote a series of autobiographical texts, scripts and journals, in which he again and again revisited his past and continually reinvented the forms of self-writing. The sequence includes Dancing Ledge (1984), The Last of England (1987) (republished as Kicking the Pricks (1996)), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Smiling in Slow Motion (2000), Blue (1993), and Chroma (1994).

The series begins with Dancing Ledge (1984), written when money for his film projects had dried up and he felt excluded and vulnerable to the gathering strength of homophobia in Thatcher's Britain. This is a book conceived in anger and isolation, and the self presented in

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Published 21 March 2002

Citation: Mepham, John. "Dancing Ledge". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 March 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5764, accessed 9 February 2010.]