Category Archives: Insights

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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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.

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Early Modern and Shakespeare, Insights

Conference Event: Practices of Collaboration in Early Modern Theatre

International Conference (online): 2nd – 4th December 2021

Practices of Collaboration in Early Modern Theatre: Authors, Actors, Printers, Playhouses, and Their Texts

This international conference takes into view the intricate interplay of numerous agents in the early modern dramatic arena: authors and their respective playing companies, actors, printers, and playhouses. 21 speakers from Australia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, and the US will discuss a spectrum of collaborative practices between these various agents in the early modern dramatic arena. Situated at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies, and early modern history, the conference aims to explore concepts of early modern collaboration and, consequently, of early modern authorship.

Keynote Speakers:

Lucy Munro (Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature, King’s College, London, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-lucy-munro ): Heminges and Condell and Shakespeare

Andy Kesson (University of Roehampton, London): “I was appointed to perform this work” (Aemelia Lanyer): What Is Early Modern Attribution?

Tiffany Stern (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham): Product Placement in the Time of Shakespeare

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20th - 21st Centuries, Contemporary, Insights

Red Light, Green Light

By Jane Elliott

The Korean TV drama Squid Game is Netflix’s most popular show ever, having reached the number one spot in ninety countries. It tells the story of a diverse group of characters, all heavily in debt, who agree to compete in a series of traditional children’s games with untraditional stakes: losers are killed and the final survivor takes the entire jackpot. Continue reading Red Light, Green Light →