Writing In Britain Research Articles

Transatlantic Reprinting and the Authorizing Efforts of British Publishers

ABSTRACT DeSpain reviews The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860 by Katie McGettigan, published by University of Massachusetts Press. McGettigan’s book builds upon the foundational work of Meredith McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003) to argue that British publishers helped expand the scope and audience for American literature by creating editions of American authors’ works that lent them greater credibility. McGettigan’s study offers in-depth case studies of British editions of hallmark American authors, including Longfellow, Poe, Melville, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Drawing on a comprehensive body of research into publishers’ circulars, advertisements, and archives, McGettigan covers multiple media forms, including deluxe editions, the cheap series, the gift book, and the magazine. DeSpain argues McGettigan’s book is an important contribution that reimagines the scholarly narrative about transatlantic reprinting as one of collaboration rather than contest. McGettigan’s most important contribution is her extensive analysis of how the cheap series created a greater global context for literature, which will prove fruitful for new scholarship about the distribution and reception of the cheap series.

Katie McGettigan, The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860

Katie McGettigan, <i>The Transatlantic Materials of American Literature: Publishing US Writing in Britain, 1830–1860</i>

Female Voices: Review on Éva Antal and Antonella Braida’s Female Voices: Forms of Women’s Reading, Self-education and Writing in Britain (1770–1830), Besançon: Press Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2022. [Bookreview

Female Voices: Review on Éva Antal and Antonella Braida’s Female Voices: Forms of Women’s Reading, Self-education and Writing in Britain (1770–1830), Besançon: Press Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2022. [Bookreview

Curve Warp Corpse: D. S. Marriott, E. A. Markham, John La Rose, Maud Sulter, and Bhanu Kapil

In this article, I read selected texts by D. S. Marriott, E. A. Markham, John La Rose, Maud Sulter, and Bhanu Kapil, reading the racial formation, poetic form, and performance of identity in these texts in terms of ‘curve’, ‘warp’, and ‘corpse’. I define and redefine these terms as movements, directions, and forms of reading, structuring my discussions accordingly, with regards to the subjects of migration, social relations, racialisation, and representation. I offer my selection and my readings of the writers and texts according to the following areas of research: representations of social relations and racial formation in poetry; dissimulation and obscurity as methods and forms that enable the resistance and refusal of visibility; performance of identity as representational strategy that also reveals the possibilities and impossibilities of representing subjectivity, existence, and life. My methodology combines historical and biographical contextualisation of the writers and texts, theorisation of race and representation, and close reading. My objectives are to promote the selected writers and texts, to offer a contribution to existing literary criticism and the ongoing study of race and poetry, to share my readings and to invite further reading and sharing. The texts include poetry, fiction, personal narrative, and visual art, as well as literary and art criticism and critical theory, primarily: Marriott’s essay ‘Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life’ (2016) and the poem ‘Pot Kettle Black’ (2011); Markham’s lecture ‘West Indian Writing in Britain: Is It True to Type?’ (1998) and the poem ‘Lambchops Has a Problem’ (1976); La Rose’s poems ‘Not From Here’ and ‘Me As Well – The Blackman’ (1966); Sulter’s poem ‘Historical Objects’ (1989), the text and visual artwork Zabat (1989), and the anthology Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990); Kapil’s book Ban en Banlieue (2015).

The Challenges of Writing in Britain

The Nowhere Man, a novel by Kamala Markandaya, was first published in 1972. Its central character is an Indian man who has already been living in London for three decades and who considers himself ...

The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789, ed. Catherine Ingrassia

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789</i>, ed. Catherine Ingrassia

A History of Historical Distances

A History of Historical Distances Jason H. Pearl (bio) The term “distance” has become a buzzword among literature scholars for new interpretive methods. How closely should we read individual texts? How heavily can we rely on abstract models to provide greater distance and perspective on numerous texts? In On Historical Distance (Yale, 2013), Mark Salber Phillips reminds us that historians have their own questions of distance, in particular the question of how distantly, or proximately, to understand and represent earlier episodes in history. Of course, the two kinds of distance are discipline specific, but each raises roughly similar methodological issues about engagement and identification on the one hand and detachment and estrangement on the other. What concerns Phillips is the always-variable relationship between actual temporal distance and represented historiographic distance, as well as the kinds and combinations of distance that make up particular historical vantage points. These matters have gone largely unacknowledged, or acknowledged only indirectly, except for a few notable exceptions, including David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country, Carlo Ginzburg’s Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, and a new volume of essays edited by Phillips, Barbara Caine, and Julia Adeney Thomas, entitled Rethinking Historical Distance.1 What the monograph under review gives us is a more sustained treatment of the concept that makes it both mobile across history and especially pertinent to the historiography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is worth pointing out that Phillips claims always to have been interested in issues of distance. This will come as no surprise to readers of his previous book, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820, the introduction and conclusion of which offer brief statements on distance that get further developed in the new book.2 In Society and Sentiment, an appreciation of the complexities of historical distance is one of the keys to recuperating the historical work of David Hume and others before Leopold von Ranke, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Jules Michelet. On Historical Distance returns to several of the same topics, as well as topics in Phillips’s earlier books on Florentine [End Page 391] and Italian history, and although this might seem redundant to some readers, the new book is aimed at a broader audience, and moreover it reinterprets the familiar material and intersperses it with much that is new.3 The most far-reaching insights come in the introduction, where historical distance is defined as encompassing the various ways history writing orients us toward different periods of the past. Distance is a primary idea of human understanding; it is a mediatory and relational concept that helps us understand historical parts and reconcile them with historical wholes. Here and throughout the book, Phillips is keen to demonstrate the complexities of distance, to show that “the plasticity of distance produces richly variable designs” (9). Holding history close does not necessarily entail identification; seeing the past more remotely does not always result in a cooler sense of proportions. The introduction elaborates four specific types of distance: “Every representation of history incorporates elements of making, feeling, acting, and understanding” (6). The first category comprises the media, genres, and conventions that give history writing its formal structures. The second refers to its affective qualities. The third denotes its ideological summons, the fourth its epistemological bases. Although these categories overlap, a certain valence in one never necessitates a corresponding valence in another, and Phillips avoids what he calls “a fixed combinatory logic,” preferring instead to consider individual texts on their own and presume a wide range of possibilities for signification (9). The rest of the book delves fairly deeply into individual historical works clustered around three moments in Western history: 1500, 1800, and 1968. Indeed, the organization of the book is a bit peculiar, though what is intended is not a comprehensive survey but “ten experiments around a central idea” (xii). Two earlier chapters concern Renaissance historiography; six middle chapters— the bulk of the book— treat different aspects of the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic historiography in Britain; and two at the end are devoted to the late twentieth century. From chapter to chapter, Phillips ranges widely, examining not...

Roger Robinson, The Butterfly Hotel

Roger Robinson is a Trinidadian poet and performer who has been based in London for a number of years now. He has had poems published in important anthologies like The Fire People (Edinburgh: Payback Press, 1998), edited by Lemm Sissay, IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, edited by Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (London: Penguin, 2000), and more recently Out of Bounds – British Black and Asian Poets, edited by Jackie Kay, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (Newcastle upon ...

Verbatim Theatre and New Writing in Britain: A State of ‘Kindred Strangers’?

Le théâtre verbatim, un type de dramaturgie qui s’appuie sur les mots exacts prononcés par des « personnes réelles », est au centre d’une renaissance inattendue du genre en Grande Bretagne depuis le milieu des années 1990. À l’heure actuelle, le statut de new writing lui est souvent refusé car ce théâtre bouleverse les certitudes culturelles de l’idéologie dominante (notion d’auteur dramatique, processus de composition, statut du texte). On inférera ici la possibilité d’une relation dynamique entre le théâtre verbatim et le genre des nouvelles écritures dramatiques. Le but du travail sera ainsi d’examiner en détail les multiples traversées et similitudes entre ces deux approches théâtrales, occurrences qui méritent, nous semble-t-il, la plus sérieuse attention ainsi qu’un approfondissement théorique. De manière certaine, le foisonnement de pièces verbatim au cours de ces deux dernières décennies s’est illustré par une absence de formes prédéterminées ouvrant sur une expérimentation esthétique ; témoignage d’une période de porosité grandissante entre les techniques verbatim et les écritures dramatiques plus conventionnelles.

Textual Transformations in Contemporary Black Writing in Britain

While the first wave of Caribbean immigrant writers brilliantly explored race-related issues, black Britons like Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips, among others, have sought to depart from earlier fiction, motivated in their project by the changing white face of Britain. In this article, I would like to argue that cultural change in Britain has deeply influenced literary production and has, consequently, laid the ground for a series of textual transformations. To capture instances of creative excess in contemporary black writing in Britain, I will bring under examination Caryl Phillips’s (2009) novel In the Falling Snow . My intention is to show to what extent Phillips’s work surpasses the ‘noose of race’ and already-familiar representations of multicultural Britain to celebrate a ‘post-racial’ society.

Colonial Memory. Contemporary Women's Travel Writing in Britain and the NetherlandsSarah De Mul Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011, 180 pp.

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Book review: Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands

Book review: Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands

The Cambridge history of postcolonial literature

The Cambridge History of Literature. Edited by Ato Quayson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 1399. $350.Ato Quayson' s introduction to The Cambridge History of Literature stakes the claim that the collection offers an overview of the productive ways in which postcolonial literature in the field has been produced and may be discussed (p. 23). More specifically, instead of functioning as an anthology that solely consolidates the encyclopedia of themes or geographical subjects of postcoloniality into one location, the essays provide a purview of the historiographie and rhetorical questions critical to the discipline of postcolonialism.In response to antecedent work found in collections like The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 2006), and Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, edited by Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair (Rutgers University Press, 2005), Quayson' s edited collection presents essays that assist in defining postcolonial literature and history. Those contained in the book trace stylistic and thematic developments, while examining neglected relationships across and within local, national, and transnational communities (pp. 2526). Thus, at the forefront of the two- volume collection are the most pertinent issues circulating within the discourses surrounding the field.Each prudently selected essay addresses what Quayson insists on as the required urgency of establishing universal terms with which one can read and study postcolonial literature. Through a historiographie tracing of the legacies of colonialism (pre-, post-, and neo-), Quayson 's introduction maintains the necessity of analyzing what he defines as colonial space-making, in order to tease out the resonance of colonialism across a multitude of nations and geographic landscapes.The volumes are divided into thirty-six chapters, complete with a chronology of historical, political, literary, and cultural events relative to colonial endeavors, as well as, a substantial bibliography instructive for both the novice and the proficient postcolonial scholar. In addition, the concluding chapter outlines the Key Journals and Organizations that have shaped the contours of the field of postcolonial studies (p. 1155).The essays contained in Volume 1 are largely composed of national, hemispheric or geographically oriented chapters across genres of slave narratives, travel writing, missionary writing and auto/biography (p. 23). Essays like Carpio' s Postcolonial Fictions of Slavery, Griffiths' Postcolonialism and Travel and MudimbeBoyi's Missionary Writing and Postcolonialism, explore both colonial legacies and lineages, in addition to the meaning making of such experiences across a multitude of genres. The inclusion of selections such as Savory's Postcolonialism and Caribbean Literature, Al-Musawi's Postcolonialism and Arab Literature, and Ortega's Postcolonialism and Latin American Writing, 1492-1850, speak to the critical need to read postcolonial histories and responses through the lens of the local. Finally, Cleary's Postcolonial Writing in Ireland, McLeod's Postcolonial Writing in Britain, and Lennox's Postcolonial Writing in Germany, lend to the discussion of inclusiveness within the defining parameters of postcolonialism. …

Sarah de Mul, Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands

Sarah de Mul, Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women’s Travel Writing in Britain and the Netherlands

Lessons from London: E. R. Braithwaite and Black Writing in 1950s Britain

The 1950s and 1960s constitute one of the most significant periods for black writing in Britain. In the wake of war and Windrush, major works appeared by Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and others, written both in Britain and about Britain by its latest citizens newly arrived from countries with a history of colonialism.1 The advent of this formidable, remarkable moment of literary creativity begs comparison with the emergence of literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century — often a product too, of course, of migrants, expatriates, and exiles. But in accounting for the literary fortunes of the mid-century, this momentous gathering of literary voices after the war has been ignored entirely or annexed into the specialist subcategory of ‘black British writing’, kept safely away from the predominant metanarrative of British literature. Ignoring black writers of Britain — their presence, their impact, their influence — is an habitual failing of so many accounts of literature from the mid-century to the present. D. J. Taylor has nothing to say about black writers from the 1950s and 1960s in his account of the novel and England since 1945, After the War (1993). While Naipaul, David Dabydeen, and Salman Rushdie eventually appear in his study, like many others Taylor recognizes a distinctly migrant and international element to postwar British writing only towards the end of the century, after 1980. It is a familiar pattern: Malcolm Bradbury’s contemporaneous but much more detailed study, The Modern British Novel (1993), makes ‘a new spirit of ethnic and stylistic multiculturalism’ in British writing a distinctly post-1979, Rushdie-prompted phenomenon.2 Everything before it seems of little consequence.

Susan Staves,A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain 1600–1789

Susan Staves,<i>A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain 1600–1789</i>

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 by Devoney Looser

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 by Devoney Looser Susan Staves (bio) Devoney Looser. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 252. $55.00. Susan Staves Brandeis University Susan Staves Susan Staves is Paul Proswimmer Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Brandeis University. Her most recent book is A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 166o-1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She is currently writing a book on the theory and rhetoric of rights in the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Copyright © 2011 by the Trustees of Boston University

Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). xi + 536 pp. £85.00 hardback. 0521858658.

Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). xi + 536 pp. £85.00 hardback. 0521858658.

CLAIRE SQUIRES. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain.

CLAIRE SQUIRES. Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain.

The Politics and Production of Contemporary British Writing

B oth Claire Squires's Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain and Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies's A Black British Canon? assess trends in recent British cultural production and make welcome contributions to a growing body of research that addresses the institutions and economics that shape contemporary literature and art.1 Reading one against the other suggests distinctions between two kinds of work in this area. One is scholarship that emerges from a materialist tradition. Building upon the legacies of British cultural studies, this research reveals how cultural production, circulation, and valuation are impinged upon, facilitated by,