Category Archives: Insights

Early Modern and Shakespeare, Insights

Teaching opportunities in Early Modern and Victorian literature

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:

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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.

 

Creative Practice, Performance and Theatrical Culture, Insights

“we are not supposed to be poets, poets are the Crème de la crème”: Reflecting on ‘A Migrant in a Piece of Paper’ (Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize Winner 2022)

By Gaby Sambuccetti

Modern Languages, Literature and Culture Master’s student Gaby Sambuccetti reflects on winning this year’s Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize. Gaby breaks down the motivations and mechanics behind her winning poem, ‘A Migrant in a Piece of Paper.’

A few months ago, I was seated on the same chair I am in right now, where I wrote a poem about migration which has recently won the 2022 Cosmo Davenport-Hines Prize at the Department of English Language and Literature at King’s College London.

Continue reading “we are not supposed to be poets, poets are the Crème de la crème”: Reflecting on ‘A Migrant in a Piece of Paper’ (Cosmo Davenport-Hines Poetry Prize Winner 2022) →

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!

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

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).

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

18th Century, Insights, Visual, Material and Sonic Cultures

Tracing the Legacy of William Blake

By James Carney

Second-year English Literature and Classics student and Gale Ambassador James Carney reflects on ‘Tracing the Legacy of William Blake with British Literary Manuscripts Online’, his recent piece published in The Gale Review.

Writing this article on William Blake finally satisfied an itch that I held for quite a long time in the most effective way possible. Over the course of my studies, Blake’s name had hung in the background as some sort of enigmatic shadow that I would encounter later, when I was ready. In my A-Level English Literature class on Christina Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites, his influence lingered but was never explicitly discussed. As I progressed to university, this ghostly influence became even more pronounced – from thematic parallels in works like J.M. Barrie’s to the shared cultural context of romanticism in studies of Wordsworth, I felt like I was gradually honing in on this mysterious figure. So, when Gale commissioned me to write an article using their British Literary Manuscripts Online, I knew exactly where my interest lay.

Continue reading Tracing the Legacy of William Blake →