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Writers looking for guidance as they embark on their first novel or short story will often come across neat formulations – little nuggets of advice that can be easily swallowed: ‘Write what you know’; ‘Show, don’t tell’. Too easily swallowed, perhaps. One of the reasons we wrote The Book You Need to Read to […]
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Sometimes, during research, what appears to be a narrow, well-charted path opens out into a startling vista. In 2016, my PhD supervisor, Anna Snaith, advised me to look at the transcripts of early radio broadcasts that were printed in the BBC magazine The Listener. I had just begun the research for a PhD thesis on […]
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You might be offered a dinner in a New England restaurant or an overnight stay in a Midlands pub, a room furnished with a four-poster bed, an oak wooden dresser or even a fishing rod. What would these have in common? They are all adorned with the branding Shakespeare by their manufacturers, proprietors, retailers. In […]
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Why, in 1882, did Harper’s Weekly publish a cartoon by Thomas Nast depicting Oscar Wilde as a mushroom? The question is one that marks the crucial influence of British decadence on the shape of modern ecological thought. The spores of this story appear as early as 1871, when critic Thomas Maitland (aka Robert Buchanan) turned […]
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Since at least the 1980’s, any university student who wanted to learn about Freud or psychoanalysis would not be directed to departments of psychology, nor to psychiatry, but would instead be ushered to the English department. The irony of this circumstance is, of course, that such guidance returns the student to the origins of psychoanalysis. […]
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Arguably, Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26) is the single most comprehensive, detailed and insightful guide we have to the state of the nation as it moved into the modern era. Does that claim look over the top? If so, let’s see how the argument runs. For starters, we shouldn’t […]
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There’s a movement to diversify the British literary canon and a crucial step may be right in front of us. Allow me to explain. The British Romantic period—broadly conceived as the 1780s through the early 1830s—was once admired for its religious aspects. Some credited the literature of the period with inspiring an Anglo-Catholic revival in […]
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If you look at the title page of my new book, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text, you might notice that there’s something missing – the space beneath my name is blank, an empty void where, usually, you would see an author’s institutional affiliation. In the three years since I submitted […]
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