University English Book Prize 2015
Chair’s Report
The majority of the 15 entries this year were in literary studies. The works ranged from the 16th century up to 21st century writing, and were on British and Anglophone authors. It was an exceptionally strong field, with a variety of approaches including the historical, theoretical, comparative and socio-political. After very careful assessment by 22 readers in all, a shortlist of three was drawn up:
1. Jeremy Davies, University of Leeds: Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature
The judges thought this study of the significance and nuances of physical pain in Romantic writing absolutely arresting. With chapters on Bentham, Sade, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and a wider-ranging attention to Romantic-Period and modern secondary literature, this is a concentrated, stylish, consistently clever book. It is very well-read in all the contexts informing the articulation of pain in the Romantic Period, and wears this learning lightly, so that it doesn’t overwhelm the primarily literary-critical focus. That’s difficult to do with such an intriguing topic, and with chapters on Bentham and torture and Sadean libertinism; and finding something new and interesting to say about Hartley and Coleridge struck the judges as little short of impossible. Jeremy Davies’ account of what he calls “Coleridge’s enthusiasm for the way in which pain made him philosophise” (page 110) is a good snapshot of the quality of this book. The critical intelligence on display in this book is of a very high order: it makes us think afresh about a preoccupation with bodily pain which many writers might want to contextualize, but which this book makes fully textual.
2. Daniel Starza Smith, Lincoln College Oxford: John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century
This is a book which opens up an archive for Donne scholarship and more generally for the study of early seventeenth-century works. The judges thought it an extremely impressive work of textual scholarship and literary history. It deals with a particular archive of manuscript material in intense and comprehensive detail, prising out new information about how manuscripts circulated and how readership circles operated. One judge said: ‘He has done a remarkable amount of work on some absurdly difficult ms materials, and he has found, synthesised and assessed a wealth of new discoveries – about ms circulation, about early modern book and ms collecting, about early modern women writers, and above all about John Donne.’ The book looks in minute detail at its MS archive and is very comprehensive, setting the material evidence both in its immediate context and in a more broadly historical one. It is also very readable, and its later chapters expand on ideas of circulation, patronage, and readership beyond its immediate focus.
3. Jarad Zimbler, University of Birmingham, J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style
This erudite, wide-ranging, intellectually ambitious work makes a significant contribution not only to Coetzee studies but also to Postcolonialist studies and contemporary fiction studies more broadly. As one judge commented, ‘Coetzee critics are an intelligent crowd and Jarad Zimbler should be commended for adding another dimension to Coetzee studies in his claim for form as a defining element of political writing’. It’s extremely assured in terms of its knowledge base (ranging from primary [including manuscript] sources of South African fiction and non-fiction and existing literary criticism, through linguistic and narratological methods to historical and political contexts). The insistent but unforced attention to what Zimbler calls ‘those subtle shifts in tense and tone, vocabulary and register’ in order to make visible ‘a politics of style’ will inform other literary critics grappling with how not to reduce the aesthetic qualities that help constitute politically-charged writings both within and beyond postcolonial studies.
The winner from this exceptional shortlist is Daniel Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers. This is a work of hugely impressive scholarship which opens up new resources for future scholars: a ground-breaking book which redefines its field.
