Category Archives: Book Review

19th Century, Book Review, Insights, Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916’

By Richard Kirkland

Written by Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory Richard Kirkland, Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916 was published by Bloomsbury in September 2021, and has a paperback release forthcoming in 2022.

What drew you to this subject?

I’ve always written about Irish culture – it’s been my life really – and in the area of Camden where I live the history of Irish London is inescapable and compelling. So I hoped the book would be a way of connecting my research interests with my day-to-day experience and the friends I have here. I’ve also thought a good deal about London itself over the years, partly because it is such a strong research and teaching area in the English department. In fact, so many of the events I describe in the book happened within a few hundred yards of what is now the Virginia Woolf Building!

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20th - 21st Centuries, Book Review, Insights, Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction’

By James Baxter

Written by London-based independent scholar James Baxter, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism was published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2021, as part of their series ‘New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty First Century.’

What drew you to this subject?

At the outset, I think it was an intuited connection between a lot of the fiction that I was reading and enjoying at the time; Beckett of course, but also American writers like Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, etc. A lot of headache-inducing postmodern stuff. While there is certainly no shortage of scholarship on Beckett’s relation to the more theoretical body of postmodernism, I was quite struck by the absence of any sustained work on literary postmodernism and the way Beckett skewers the work of periodisation by serving as an end but also a beginning for this new paradigm (not unlike the kind of stalled narrative sequences that a reader encounters in his mid-century Trilogy).

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Book Review, Long Read

The 2021 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, Recommended by Patrick Wright

By Sophie Roell and Patrick Wright

Sophie: Through careful research and compelling argument, the books shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding cast light on globally significant problems, says Patrick Wright, chair of the 2021 jury and Emeritus Professor of Literature, History and Politics at King’s College London. Here he talks us through the books that made the 2021 shortlist as well as last year’s winner, works of nonfiction that “speak directly to the urgent challenges of the times in which we live”.

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20th - 21st Centuries, Book Review, Contemporary, Culture, Text and History, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance, Long Read

“And I said that, I”: Connie Palmen’s novel Your Story, My Story

by Sylvia Solakidi

In this blog, King’s graduate Sylvia Solakidi explores the role of betrayal in the quest for love and knowledge in Connie Palmen’s novel about the contentious romance of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

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18th Century, 19th Century, 20th - 21st Centuries, Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Studies, Book Review, Cross-temporal, Culture, Text and History, Early Modern and Shakespeare

Lockdown Reading Recommendations from the English Department

Six members of the King’s English Department have pulled together a list of the books, poems, and writing that have been inspiring them during lockdown.

This post was originally posted on Between the Acts, a space for writing by students of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and shared via the Offer Holder Hub by Ellen Englefield and Hannah Hungerford.

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