Products and services
Edmund Curll has gone down as the bad boy of British publishing, and it would be an affectation to disagree with this verdict. Even people with no special interest in book history or the eighteenth century may have come across him, called out as an unscrupulous operator who produced risqué volumes and pirated the works […]
Read More
Whenever I mention that I’ve just written a book on slavery and literature in Cuba in the nineteenth century, the conversation almost immediately turns to the present. Do I travel to Cuba? How do Cubans survive? How do they keep food with 40- or 50-hour-long blackouts? The present, however, is never as far from the […]
Read More
On the publication of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World in 1762, the British Magazine described it as ‘Light, agreeable summer reading, partly original, partly borrowed’. In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), just over fifty years later, by contrast, William Hazlitt rather differently claimed that ‘For light summer reading, it is […]
Read More
Why would a psychiatric institution publish a periodical in the nineteenth century? This is the question I asked myself ten years ago, when I read the following sentence on the website of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital: ‘A printing press was installed, and a magazine, the Morningside Mirror, was produced.’ I soon found out that the […]
Read More
Tankers and pipelines spill their toxic contents into oceans and wetlands, the AI industry guzzles massive amounts of water, and imperialist warmongers decimate animals, species, and biosystems across our planet. And yet, through it all, my community’s Facebook group has remained focused, instead, on excoriating a thoughtless litterbug and a band of noisy ATVers who […]
Read More
As my book neared completion, I thought, ‘how great would it be to organize a book launch, something small?” I’m the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Martin Amis, featuring 14 contributors from five different countries. I imagined a roundtable discussion, a few hours max, at one of our universities. Easy, quick, small. ‘Probably won’t […]
Read More
Have the courage of your convictions. Be a person of conviction. Carry conviction. Stand tall in your conviction. As these idioms attest, we have a strong cultural conviction that conviction is a virtue and that anything less betrays weakness—or as W. B. Yeats put it more dramatically, that civilization itself is at stake when “[t]he […]
Read More
The cover of The Anthropocene and Literature features a photo from an abandoned house in the ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia. The former mining town was established in the early twentieth century when Namibia was still a German colony, and it was abandoned only fifty years later, when the diamond mines were depleted. With […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
