History Meets Modernity: A Conversation with Professor Jeremy Tambling

Abstract

Jeremy Tambling was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. He has written many books touching on Renaissance literature and on religious writing of the period including Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester UP, 1990), Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare (Rodopi, 2004), and, as part of the New Critical Idiom series, Allegory (Routledge, 2009). Hasting G. Chen is a graduate student at National Taiwan University who works on Renaissance Literature and History. He is also the Chief Executive of L’Atelier Culture and Publishing Co., Ltd., cofounded in 2012, which is interested in bringing English and Renaissance literature to more readers in Taiwan. Q: You taught English literature of the early modern period to students in Hong Kong for eighteen years. I wonder if you could share something of that experience with us. What courses did you teach? A: I taught a variety of courses, one on nineteenth-century literature, another on literature and philosophy, another on history of sexuality, still another on carnival and tragedy.While I was engagedwith cultural studies, I also started a course onDante and Boccaccio, just looking at these two writers and their English translators. It was a very enjoyable experience. I devised the course called “Carnival and Tragedy” to try to approach the early modern [period]. I took the view that [Hong Kong] students were completely new to the subject. For that reason, almost anything I offeredwould be new. It was best not to present them with a course on a particular topic or specific historical period.However, in “Carnival andTragedy” Iwas able to include a little bit ofRabelais, Erasmus (APraiseofFolly), andquite a lotof Shakespeare, albeit in translations. For this course I even covered Racine’s Phaedra. I was always trying to excite student interest. Q: What would you consider to be the most challenging aspect for introducing early modern English literature to students in Asia? A: When I first came to Hong Kong, I found it very challenging, because I had to teach all kinds of literature with which the students were not familiar. There was no reason why a Chinese student should feel interested in Western texts. However,