University English Book Prize 2018
Chair’s Report:
We had the largest number of entries on record this year – 18 in total – and shortlisted 4, all of which had been awarded top score of 5 during the initial round of judging.
Shortlisted Entries ( in alphabetical order):
Maria Christou (Manchester) Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature
Joseph Hone (Cambridge) Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne
Luke Roberts (King’s College) Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things
Simon Smith (Birmingham) Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625
Reports:
Maria Christou (Manchester)
Eating Otherwise: The Philosophy of Food in Twentieth-Century Literature
Cambridge University Press
Review: This work offers an innovative discussion of the ‘connections between the alimentary and the ontological – between what and how one eats and what one is’; it opens up new theoretical ways to think about both sides of this relationship. Christou deftly illustrates the importance of identifying and revaluating eating practices in twentieth-century literature, adeptly demonstrating how the unusual treatment of the alimentary furthers our comprehension of modernism and postmodernism in terms of their affiliation and experimentalism. This is a wonderfully written work, managing that ever-so-difficult task of being both scholarly and lively at the same time.
Joseph Hone (Cambridge)
Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne
Oxford University Press
Review: This is a serious literary-historical work. It is full of rich detail about Queen Anne, her coronation, her royal progress to Oxford, Bath and Bristol. Hone engages equally with the research of historians, especially political historians, as he does with literary scholars. It’s clear that Hone understands the ‘microhistory of the early 1800s’ extraordinarily well. The range of primary sources consulted is equally impressive. As an example of a literary study that recovers the micro-history of a political moment this is outstanding.
Luke Roberts (King’s College)
Barry MacSweeney and the Politics of Post-War British Poetry: Seditious Things
Palgrave
Review: This book makes an outstanding original contribution to the study of post war literature in Britain. In wonderfully lucid prose, Roberts argues for the rehabilitation of MacSweeney’s poetry from the predictable pigeonholing of him as the semi-mythical self-destructive artist. The scholarship is exemplary, surveying the rich archival material and placing the compelling close readings of the poetry within a material culture of poetic and praxis. In its communicative clarity and knowledge, it does what all good scholarly books do, or should do, it educates you as to the various textures of a historical and cultural period.
Simon Smith (Birmingham)
Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625
Cambridge University Press
Review: This book is highly original in several ways, but most obviously because it is about an irrecoverable subject: musical response in the playhouse. Undaunted by the lack of obvious sources, Smith carefully recovers what information is available in a variety of places: from musical theory at the time, to cues in play-texts, to imaginings of responses in paratexts. What makes this an exceptional study, though, is the knowingness with which Smith reflects on the difficulty of reconstructing this narrative: he is bold in thinking ‘beyond recoverable evidence’, while recognising the limits of ‘inference’. This is a book that will be an essential reference for further work on music within early modern drama and for future accounts of musical affect in the period. It will also be essential reading for those working in interdisciplinary literature and music studies or the wider field of sound studies, both of them currently expanding fields of scholarship.
Simon Smith (Birmingham) – Winner
Maria Christou (Manchester) – Honourable Mention
