Book Prize

University English Book Prize 2021

The University English Book Prize for 2021 was awarded to Asha Rogers for State-Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945, published by Oxford University Press.

Shortlist:

Boriana Alexandrova (University of York)  – Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave)

This innovative study focuses on the multilingualism of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the ethics of reading and the role of ‘otherness’ in bringing illumination to our reading practice. As Alexandrova asks, ‘’[w]hat if the Wake’s ideal reader was not a native English or Irish English speaker, or a ‘fluent’ reader in any sense, but rather someone willing to occupy the position of the foreigner: the multilingual reader?” This is commanding and deeply researched work, which has application beyond scholarship in Joyce, challenging us to rethink the relationship between multilingualism, nation and idea of the polyglot.

The book offers new theoretical frameworks for the study of multilingual and migrant literatures, and will make a significant contribution to the way we understand both the relationship between reading and translation, and the creative possibilities of the multilingual.

Sourit Bhattacharya (University of Edinburgh) – Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave)

This is a fascinating and original study of the kinds of modes of writing available, in this case a version of realism, to narrate postcolonial catastrophe specifically in the Indian context. By exploring the literary works which narrate the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the 1967-32 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975-77 Indian emergency, the book argues that a historical event is also a crystallisation of a ‘long term socio-economic crisis’. It uses this thesis to consider the relationship between event and narrative in the work of a range of writers, including Amalendu Chakraborty, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, and Nabarun Bhattacharya. The book asks us to consider what literary form can say about the notion of catastrophe, and offers the notion of ‘critical solidarity’ to rethink reading of Indian postcolonial society. Impressive in its breadth and energy, the book also shed light on authors who have often been neglected or less visible in critical studies, offering a new counter-genealogy of the postcolonial Indian novel.

Asha Rogers (University of Birmingham) –  State-Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (Oxford University Press)

This is a fascinating book, remarkable for the depth of its archival research. It takes on the ambitious task of exploring the often surprising and nuanced nature of the relationship between the state and public culture in the post-war period. It explores its subject through a series of case studies – the development of the Arts Council, including its relationship with Black British writing, the ways The Satanic Verses staged a new conversation about community relations and the state’s relationship to the literary text, and the status of ‘cultural’ texts in the NEAB anthology for GCSE English. Despite its range, one of its greatest strengths is its specificity, in terms of both the acute focus of its approach and also the volume of detail, which is marshalled deftly into a convincing, compelling argument which encompasses the provincial and the global, and understands the relationships between them. The subject needs an approach which can encompass its labyrinthine, complex and contradictory impulses and expressions, and receives it here.

Lydia Zeldenrust – Melusine Romance in Medieval Europe (Boydell and Brewer)

This is a focused and rigorous piece of scholarship, breaking new ground in its treatment of Mėlusine and its transmission as a bestseller across fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe.  Drawing on the reception of the French Romance via five different languages, Zeldenrust offers new insights on how we understand vernacular translation, the role of literary production and presentation in understanding adaptation, and the key role of print circulation in the period. The book uses Mėlusine as a case study to provide new understandings of print culture across Western Europe, and will make a significant contribution to the way we understand transnational reception in the period, and the role of printed translations in particular.

University English Book Prize 2020

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) has won the 2020 University English Book Prize for her monograph Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space. The judging panel felt that this was the standout entry in an impressive field – and they noted that this was an exceptional year, with more entries submitted than in any previous round of the competition. Honourable Mentions have been awarded to all of the shortlisted authors, who should be congratulated on their exceptional work.

We’re delighted to announce the shortlisted entries for the 2020 Book Prize. We had our largest ever field this year, with entries ranging across a huge range of periods and topics. As ever, the quality of the work is humbling and fills us with confidence in the future of research in English Studies.

Prize Shortlist

Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) – Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space (Manchester University Press, 2019)

This book develops an imaginative interpretive method by thinking through considerations of the spatial and movement between spaces. The monograph itself moves simultaneously through illuminating readings of Spenser’s poetry and its intertextual, historical and cultural contexts. It offers a topological account of real intellectual complexity, turning to horizons, edges, and impasses.  There is an innovative use of intertexts, particularly cosmography and navigation, and it makes a compelling case for the persuasive and rhetorical power of Spenser’s ‘simultaneity of stories’. This is an outstanding work – original, rigorous, and a highly significant contribution to current literary studies.

Hannah Roche (University of York) – The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia, 2019)

This work offers a nuanced, scholarly and original approach to some knotty and well-trodden critical issues. Exploring both canonical and notably under-researched texts by Hall,  Barnes and Stein, Roche argues for the importance of the label “lesbian” within queer studies; not  as a corrective but as a means to draw our attention to the particular, especially the particular  ways in which lesbian and bisexual authors articulated desire between women through the frankly  unlikely mode of the heterosexual romance novel. The book makes an important intervention in  queer theory and sexuality and gender studies, and also in the study of romance, Modernism and women’s  writing.

Harry Newman (Royal Holloway) – Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority, and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 2019)

This monograph offers an intricate analysis of Shakespeare and impression both material and figurative, producing original readings that broaden the understanding of Shakespeare and print culture.  Although focused on four plays, it finds ways to read across, through, and between the texts that give it a much broader scope and significance.  The book opens up original ways to think about Shakespeare’s status in both its cultural and textual forms, but its insights on reception and the canon will be of benefit to scholars working outside the Early Modern period.

James Wood (UEA) – Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth (University of Virginia, 2019)

This book shines a light on the place of anecdote across a huge range of genres, helping us profoundly rethink the place of anecdote in eighteenth-century culture. It is equally at home parsing philosophy, print journalism, genre and media systems and individual works of poetry and prose. Like the anecdotes it attends to, small moments of insight and observation come to take on startling significance, and it moves impressively between textual and contextual readings. The monograph persuades us to embrace and admire the ‘unassimilable oddness’ of the anecdote and its place in narrative: both as impediment and spur.

University English Book Prize 2019

1. Winner: Emily Senior, The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination 1764-1834 (Cambridge University Press)

This is a compelling work, which clearly succeeds in its ambition to shift the angle of view in ‘medical humanities’: it rethinks the history of literature written in and about the Caribbean to show us how the medical knowledge indigenous and acquired there shaped ‘modern’ discourses of race, nation and climate. It turns our attention away from the abolitionist lens which has dictated our view of the colonial Caribbean and addresses the particularities of the Caribbean ‘as a set of localized material places with unique literary and cultural histories’ . While the book’s focus is on a specific locale its range is hugely impressive. For a literary scholar it gives new and timely insight into genres that have tended to be marked as ‘English’: the georgic, the pastoral, the sentimental novel. It shows us how suffused these genres are in fact with the encounter with the peoples, places –and above all the diseases –of the Caribbean. Senior’s book asks us to reimagine what we thought we knew about Empire, representation and the politics of genre in the eighteenth century. Every chapter takes the reader on a different imaginative trajectory and often in ways that are inspired. In particular, the chapter (three on ‘Skin and Colonial Feeling’) identifies the new ways in which skin came to be imagined in the eighteenth century through a fascinating reading of John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1790): as an organ rather than a container, as a site of feeling and of difference is wholly original and beautifully written, managing its own careful and sensitive relationship to troubling material. The book addresses a huge variety and number of literary and medical works, treating both kinds of writing with a forensic eye for detail, while building up an ambitious and wholly original argument. Erudite, well-written, expansive, yet detailed, it is likely to be a scholarly reference point for years to come.

Honourable Mention:  Laura Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity

There is a high level of originality in this project, which looks at the influence and reception of ‘ancient Rome’ in Victorian England, with a strong focus on concepts and practices of masculinity. There are quite a few studies on links between Victorian writing and ancient Greece, but very little on classical Rome. The book’s approach, through the lens of gender studies, politics, and imperialism, is also innovative and gives the book a very clear direction and purpose as well as a wide appeal beyond literary studies in a narrow sense. One of the main arguments is that the British Empire, the bedrock of nineteenth-century identity and masculinity, was inevitably compared to, and to some extent modelled on, the Roman empire –or at least, what were regarded as its finest features, such as stoicism, bravery, and leadership. The book is significant for the scholarly community and for teachers, since it deals with canonical writers such as Collins and Trollope, putting them into context with less well-studied authors such as Pater and bringing forward new evidence and interpretations (such as Trollope’s engagement with Caesar and Roman history, and Pater’s efforts to redeem classical Roman society as less degenerate than was often represented). Finally, the book is extremely rigorous, showing a wide breadth and depth of scholarship and an effective methodology. The author has combed the archives, including letters, magazine and newspaper articles, and a great range of secondary criticism. The theoretical basis of her approach to masculinity is securely grounded in recent studies while moving forward to explore Victorian alternatives to the limited and conventional models of masculinity that were available at the time. The case studies, such as that of the reception of the Emperor Nero who was perceived as either monstrous or as an ideal of artistic masculinity, are both fascinating and well-argued.

Honourable Mention:  Dahlia Porter, Science, Form and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press)

This is a confident and ambitious work of analysis and argument. It offers a compelling account of induction’s emergence through the eighteenth century as the method for arriving at knowledge in an age increasingly aware of and fearful about saturation by information (equivalent to our own digital moment). It makes a significant contribution to debates over the history of the book, digital humanities and the interdisciplinary fields of histories of science and literature. Its blend of philosophical, interpretative and analytic work is persuasive and arresting, and  – to single out one aspect of its many intricate details –  the discussion of the prose-verse hybridity of Edgeworth and Smith was exceptional.  More broadly, in tracing changing perceptions and anxieties about the composite in culture, the monograph offers a fascinating insight into taste, form, and style in the period.  What rendered this book quite unique and particularly impressed the judging panel was the the links it made between induction as a scientific, philosophical and literary practice: in doing so, it not only helps trouble the distinction between empirical and creative thinking in significant ways, but caused us to reflect anew on how our own compositional and scholarly practices – textual evidence and selective quotation – have a cross-disciplinary history.

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