The University English Book Prize for 2021 was awarded to Asha Rogers for State-Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945, published by Oxford University Press.

Shortlist:

Boriana Alexandrova (University of York)  – Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave)

This innovative study focuses on the multilingualism of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the ethics of reading and the role of ‘otherness’ in bringing illumination to our reading practice. As Alexandrova asks, ‘’[w]hat if the Wake’s ideal reader was not a native English or Irish English speaker, or a ‘fluent’ reader in any sense, but rather someone willing to occupy the position of the foreigner: the multilingual reader?” This is commanding and deeply researched work, which has application beyond scholarship in Joyce, challenging us to rethink the relationship between multilingualism, nation and idea of the polyglot.

The book offers new theoretical frameworks for the study of multilingual and migrant literatures, and will make a significant contribution to the way we understand both the relationship between reading and translation, and the creative possibilities of the multilingual.

Sourit Bhattacharya (University of Edinburgh) – Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave)

This is a fascinating and original study of the kinds of modes of writing available, in this case a version of realism, to narrate postcolonial catastrophe specifically in the Indian context. By exploring the literary works which narrate the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the 1967-32 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975-77 Indian emergency, the book argues that a historical event is also a crystallisation of a ‘long term socio-economic crisis’. It uses this thesis to consider the relationship between event and narrative in the work of a range of writers, including Amalendu Chakraborty, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Mahasweta Devi, and Nabarun Bhattacharya. The book asks us to consider what literary form can say about the notion of catastrophe, and offers the notion of ‘critical solidarity’ to rethink reading of Indian postcolonial society. Impressive in its breadth and energy, the book also shed light on authors who have often been neglected or less visible in critical studies, offering a new counter-genealogy of the postcolonial Indian novel.

Asha Rogers (University of Birmingham) –  State-Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (Oxford University Press)

This is a fascinating book, remarkable for the depth of its archival research. It takes on the ambitious task of exploring the often surprising and nuanced nature of the relationship between the state and public culture in the post-war period. It explores its subject through a series of case studies – the development of the Arts Council, including its relationship with Black British writing, the ways The Satanic Verses staged a new conversation about community relations and the state’s relationship to the literary text, and the status of ‘cultural’ texts in the NEAB anthology for GCSE English. Despite its range, one of its greatest strengths is its specificity, in terms of both the acute focus of its approach and also the volume of detail, which is marshalled deftly into a convincing, compelling argument which encompasses the provincial and the global, and understands the relationships between them. The subject needs an approach which can encompass its labyrinthine, complex and contradictory impulses and expressions, and receives it here.

Lydia Zeldenrust – Melusine Romance in Medieval Europe (Boydell and Brewer)

This is a focused and rigorous piece of scholarship, breaking new ground in its treatment of Mėlusine and its transmission as a bestseller across fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe.  Drawing on the reception of the French Romance via five different languages, Zeldenrust offers new insights on how we understand vernacular translation, the role of literary production and presentation in understanding adaptation, and the key role of print circulation in the period. The book uses Mėlusine as a case study to provide new understandings of print culture across Western Europe, and will make a significant contribution to the way we understand transnational reception in the period, and the role of printed translations in particular.