By Subha Robert William
RashDash’s Oh Mother opens up with mess. Abi and Helen find themselves in a place of undoing. As they are left with just five minutes before the show starts, things around them are in disarray. Continue reading Oh Mother by RashDash, Soho Theatre (19th July-13th August 2022)
The Department of English currently has hourly-paid teaching opportunities in Early Modern and Victorian literature for 2022/23.
Early Modern Teaching
Semester One
Convene and teach a second-year module, 5AAEB066 Poetry of Revolution, including lectures and three 1-hour seminar groups (40 hours)
Semester Two
Convene and teach an MA option module, 7AAEM836 Contested Voices in Early Modern England (20 hours)
Victorian Teaching
Semester 1
Convene and teach a second-year module, 5AAEB024 Victorians and the Making of the Modern World, including lectures and two 1-hour seminar groups (30 hours)
Semester 2
Teach on a second-year module, 5AAEB041 Wilde Times: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1890s: two 1-hour seminar groups weekly
Convene and teach a first-year module, 4AAEA015 Ghosts, Vampires, Monsters and Werewolves: Writing the Uncanny in the Nineteenth Century: lectures and two 1-hour seminar groups (30 hours)
Convene and teach a third-year module, 6AAEC119 Raw Victorians: Race, Environment and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: one 2-hour seminar weekly (20 hours)
Please see attached for more information and to apply:
Closing date: July 19th 2022, 5pm.
Blog posts on King’s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King’s College London.
By Ahmed Honeini
KCL alumnus Dr Ahmed Honeini discusses his formative experience first reading William Faulkner ten years ago, alongside the state of Faulkner Studies in the UK today.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Gatz, “a penniless young man without a past,” finds himself in the house of his love Daisy Fay “by a colossal accident.” The Great Gatsby has been one of my favourite books since high school. In 2012, as a second-year English with Film Studies undergraduate at King’s College London, I took the module “Twentieth Century American Fiction, 1900-1945: Realisms and Modernisms” for the sole purpose of rereading and studying Fitzgerald’s masterwork at university level. I am ashamed to admit that I did not have much of an interest in American literature at that point; aside from Fitzgerald, my literary infatuations at the time were early modern drama and European modernism. However, on that same American fiction module, I discovered the work of William Faulkner, and specifically his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury, “a colossal accident” which was to change the course of my professional and personal life.
Continue reading “A colossal accident”: Reflections on Discovering Faulkner at KCL
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!
Continue reading New Book Releases: ‘Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916’
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).
Continue reading New Book Releases: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction’
