University English Book Prize 2017
We were delighted to have an exceptionally strong shortlist for the 2017 Book Prize. As the panel’s comments on each book below indicate, the quality of the shortlisted entries was excellent, and we broke with tradition to award both the prize itself and an honourable mention:
This is an intriguing study which compares Kipling and Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, charting mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric to establish shared concerns. The judges found it an extremely thoughtful piece of work, individually insightful on different aspects of Yeats and Kipling, but also doing something different with the comparative account of the two authors within a literary field. The author is ingenuously aware of the difficulty of what he has taken on, and the experiment is cleverly and consistently pursued with repeated success. The points of linkage – childhood, Wordsworthianism, decadence, relationships with ‘home’, the interest in folklore – are illuminatingly taken up in turn; and the sense of an encompassing networked London literary world is evoked very successfully. The judges found it a striking and stylish piece of writing.
Louise Curran, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (Cambridge UP, 2016)
This is a study of what Richardson said in his letters and how he managed himself as a letter writer. His self-characterisation as ‘an undesigning scribbler’ is obviously a kind of bluff, and Curran’s new study says many interesting things about his conscious self-fashioning. The conflict between plainness and elevation in the letters of the developing text of Pamela is well-observed, and the book’s detailed account of Richardson’s long correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh expertly highlights his recurring interest in public and private selves. The judges found it a very informative, well-researched, study which will be a mine of information for other readers and critics.
Charlie Lee-Potter, Writing the 9/11 Decade (Bloomsbury, 2017 but available 2016)
The book is structured round close cultural readings of key 9/11 texts, including works by Jay McInerney, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, and Amy Waldman. What makes it distinct is its sensitive and agile understanding of how journalism and fiction interact, react, and play off against each other, providing an historic, thematic, formalist and geographical response to 9/11. The book contains meticulous personal testimony and original interviews with authors from Rowan Williams, Ian McEwan, Paul Auster and Kamila Shamsie amongst others, creating a remarkable journalistic archive of personal correspondence with these international authors in relation to 9/11. It crosses the territories between literary analysis and journalism. The judges were impressed by the depth of its ethical questioning, and the poise of its execution.
Beth Rodgers, Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Palgrave, 2016)
This original study focuses on adolescent girlhood in a range of central but often lesser-known authors of the late nineteenth century, and contributes considerable nuance and insight to studies of youth, of children’s literature (especially the girls’ school story), and of print culture. Work undertaken on periodicals is particularly original in allowing the voices of readers (most notably letter-writers in girls’ magazines) as well as authors to shape the argument. Bringing together fin-de-siècle periodicals and short stories with writers from Olive Schreiner to Sarah Grand, it is commendable for its detail and depth.
Winner – Alexander Bubb
Special Mention – Beth Rodgers
