University English Book Prize 2016
There were twelve entries for the 2016 University English Book Prize. As the comments below on the shortlisted books suggest, the judges found each of them excellent. However they were unanimous in their decision to award the prize to Vidyan Ravinthiran for Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic.
William Wootten‘s THE ALVAREZ GENERATION: THOM GUNN, GEOFFREY HILL, TED HUGHES, SYLVIA PLATH, AND PETER PORTER (Liverpool) is a brilliantly comprehensive portrait of a literary generation, drawn from a new angle. The book covers something of the same territory as Blake Morrison’s The Movement, but puts a fresh and original emphasis on several key writers, and tracks strikingly new paths: it is a remarkable and original account of literary interrelationship, both poetic and critical. William Wootten writes with great style, with wit and critical elegance, and his book stands as an immensely suggestive re-interpretation of a great period in post-War British literary culture.
Rachel Willie‘s STAGING THE REVOLUTION: DRAMA, REVINVENTION, AND HISTORY 1647-72 (Manchester) is a truly remarkable contribution to our understanding of interregnum and post-Restoration theatre. Its central argument — that the drama across the period is marked by striking continuities as well as disruptions — is sustained with a deeply impressive scholarly command; and the sheer range of reference, both primary and secondary, is exceptional. Any easy assumptions we might have entertained about the relationship between republican culture and theatrical practice are authoritatively overturned, and the study gives the great satisfaction of returning us from a broad idea of historical change to the much greater real complexity that happened at the time.
Mary L. Shannon‘s DICKENS, REYNOLDS, AND MAYHEW ON WELLINGTON STREET (Ashgate) is a cornucopia of a book, a rich, diverse, multifarious evocation of a London street that sat at the heart of Victorian literary life. It has something of the multitudinousness excitement of a Dickens novel, full of the energy and life of the time. The amount of detail in the book is immense, absorbing, and lovingly orchestrated; and the intricate networks of connection between diverse aspects of the thriving periodical culture of the time are traced with vivid colour and meticulous particularity.
Vidyan Ravinthiran‘s ELIZABETH BISHOP’S PROSAIC (Rutgers) is a dazzling study of the formal life of the prose of one of the greatest writers of the modern period — her essays, prose poems, and letters. The book establishes a way of analysing the rhythms of prose in a way which will be exemplary for other scholars of the subject, exploring the minutiae of Bishop’s practice with memorably impressive insight and tact. This is a book which effectively discovers a new subject for critical and scholarly enquiry and describes its flexible and responsive genius with remarkable success.
