Harriet Soper, The Life Course in Old English Poetry
(Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Institutional affiliation: University of Bristol
This is an excellent book which shows how Old English poetry directs the gaze to the fluid and contingent nature of the life course. While concerned with the formal and rhetorical qualities of Old English verse, it focusses on points of transition and transformation across the life course. Grounded in the Old English canon, it moves deftly across areas of social and cultural history and draws intelligently on appropriate theory along the way. Indeed, in its application of contemporary theoretical frameworks (e.g. sociological notions of the life course; trauma studies) to Old English verse, the monograph is entirely original.
As the first book-length study of the whole of the life course in Old English verse, it will certainly be significant to specialists, though its reach is very likely to be more extensive given its literary-critical approach and theoretical concerns. The very idea of the life course has huge relevance and possibility and constitutes a demonstration that even some of the scholarship that might, on the face of it, look furthest away from the concerns of contemporary living and ageing, could in fact be dynamically close to it.
In terms of rigour, it builds on previous scholarship, producing new readings through analysis of intertexts/parallel texts, bringing to bear new frames of reference to the considerable corpus of works analysed. The impressive ‘A Note on the Chronology of Old English Poetry’ that begins Soper’s book (pp.xii-xiv), serves to establish just such a rigorous, tested foundation. The book that follows really builds on, and takes further, that commitment to grounding out its enterprise and analysis all the way through. Consisting of four substantive chapters in addition to a carefully crafted introduction and conclusion, the book “is structured around transitional phases in the life course as depicted in Old English poetry, especially the process of becoming fully shaped by others early in life, the metamorphoses by which youth can become mature adulthood, the experience of feeling oneself to be old and living in the absence of loved ones, and entry into the suspended and unresolved condition of the death state” (Soper 2024, p. 5). The main text is followed by extensive notes and a large bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
The author communicates with ease and authority, and many of her interpretations of subtle and complicated literary texts are compelling. In short, this excellent book, written in a scholarly yet accessible manner, is at once full of learning and a pleasure to read.
Congratulations to our 2024 shortlist!
Erin Forbes, Douglas R.J. Small, Monika Smialkowska and Harriet Soper
Shortlist Overview
Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature 1793–1845 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
Institutional affiliation: University of Bristol
In Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature 1793–1845, Forbes uncovers a model of collective agency in American literature and culture. Identifying creative genius in the figure of the convict, the zombie, the outlaw, the insurgent, and the fugitive, Forbes deepens our understanding of the historical relationship between criminality and Blackness and reestablishes the importance of the aesthetic in early African American literature. This highly original book examines the backstory to the conjunction of criminality and genius in the US in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century in terms of its “liberatory possibilities from within a larger climate of anti-Blackness” (p.11). The equation of (Black) criminality and genius is a debate-changer. In the vein of revisionary work such as that of Kevin Quashie, Criminal Genius upturns conventional (and lazy) assumptions about Blackness. Its scope and scholarship are admirable, its argument ingenious and intriguing in its employment of a kind of deconstructive logic which provides a key thesis for the study i.e. Locke claims that being human involves being “capable of law” (p. 10); therefore, Forbes argues, excluded individuals demonstrate their personhood by breaking the law.
In short, it is a book written with impressive scholarly lucidity and sophistication. Forbes’ own remarks supply a fitting conclusion: “Displacing the resistant hero, criminal genius, whether figured as zombie, outlaw, convict, insurgent, or fugitive, offers powerful historical examples of world breaking and world making” (p. 195).
Douglas R. J. Small, Cocaine, Literature and Culture 1876-1930 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
Institutional affiliation: University of Glasgow
This is a well-researched interdisciplinary study that tells a fascinating story of how Victorian attitudes shaped their imaginative encounters with cocaine. Its Sontag-influenced approach to metaphor through the medical humanities gives it an originality of approach to a topic that has more often been considered more purely historically or legally; the primary materials of the study, which move across a wide historical and textual field that encompasses reports of events, medical studies, contemporary images and imaginative literature (including Doyle) provide a rich set of examples, chapter-by-chapter. Small does a very good local job of pointing up the significance of his readings, showing how they depart from or extend earlier accounts, so that the framing of the study is very effectively done.
Methodologically, the study pays very rewarding attention through its medical humanities approach to these materials, opening up new ways of attending even to familiar texts. The book’s real strengths, however, lie in its recognition of the limits of reading public perception through scientific data and legal processes. To make his argument, Small draws his evidence base from the more wide-ranging accounts of cocaine taking in memoirs, print media, diaries, interviews and literature. Thus, the book does a very good job of focussing its exploration on the public and literary conception and perception of the morality of cocaine in late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.
In short, this book is an important source of reference for anyone interested in the cultural history of cocaine in the nineteenth century. It is rigorous in its examination of sources, including periodical and medical literature.
Monika Smialkowska, Shakespeare’s Tercentenary: Staging Nations and Performing Identities in 1916. (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Institutional affiliation: University of Northumbria
Smialkowska is to be commended on their depth and breadth of scholarship; this is an innovative study, examining the ‘global celebrations/commemorations’ of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in 1916, with a particular focus on Germany, Britian and her allies and America, including American racial and ethnic minorities, investigating “the socio-political implications of commemorating Shakespeare in that momentous year” (3). This is a significant thesis, which has application beyond scholarship in Shakespeare, as it raises issues surrounding a writer’s cultural capital, the use of cultural heritage, appropriations and reappropriations and collective memory as a social construct. By examining Shakespearean commemoration, Smialkowska illustrates how Shakespeare was deployed as a way of engaging with current affairs and “has been adapted to serve an astonishing range of purposes, sometimes diametrically opposed to one another” (289). The thesis is grounded in precision and research, illuminating wider historical and cultural contexts, which will undoubtedly be of interest to those outside of literary studies.
In short, this is a very authoritative and useful volume – something that literary scholars considering references to Shakespeare in early 20thc literature are likely to consult. The research is rigorous, and the book is well presented with a coherent argument that resituates our understanding of commemorations of Shakespeare – across a range of diverse communities and settings. As a historical account, it is fascinating and of interest to the wider discipline.
