University English Book Prize 2020

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) has won the 2020 University English Book Prize for her monograph Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space. The judging panel felt that this was the standout entry in an impressive field – and they noted that this was an exceptional year, with more entries submitted than in any previous round of the competition. Honourable Mentions have been awarded to all of the shortlisted authors, who should be congratulated on their exceptional work.

We’re delighted to announce the shortlisted entries for the 2020 Book Prize. We had our largest ever field this year, with entries ranging across a huge range of periods and topics. As ever, the quality of the work is humbling and fills us with confidence in the future of research in English Studies.

Prize Shortlist

Tamsin Badcoe (University of Bristol) – Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space (Manchester University Press, 2019)

This book develops an imaginative interpretive method by thinking through considerations of the spatial and movement between spaces. The monograph itself moves simultaneously through illuminating readings of Spenser’s poetry and its intertextual, historical and cultural contexts. It offers a topological account of real intellectual complexity, turning to horizons, edges, and impasses.  There is an innovative use of intertexts, particularly cosmography and navigation, and it makes a compelling case for the persuasive and rhetorical power of Spenser’s ‘simultaneity of stories’. This is an outstanding work – original, rigorous, and a highly significant contribution to current literary studies.

Hannah Roche (University of York) – The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia, 2019)

This work offers a nuanced, scholarly and original approach to some knotty and well-trodden critical issues. Exploring both canonical and notably under-researched texts by Hall,  Barnes and Stein, Roche argues for the importance of the label “lesbian” within queer studies; not  as a corrective but as a means to draw our attention to the particular, especially the particular  ways in which lesbian and bisexual authors articulated desire between women through the frankly  unlikely mode of the heterosexual romance novel. The book makes an important intervention in  queer theory and sexuality and gender studies, and also in the study of romance, Modernism and women’s  writing.

Harry Newman (Royal Holloway) – Impressive Shakespeare: Identity, Authority, and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 2019)

This monograph offers an intricate analysis of Shakespeare and impression both material and figurative, producing original readings that broaden the understanding of Shakespeare and print culture.  Although focused on four plays, it finds ways to read across, through, and between the texts that give it a much broader scope and significance.  The book opens up original ways to think about Shakespeare’s status in both its cultural and textual forms, but its insights on reception and the canon will be of benefit to scholars working outside the Early Modern period.

James Wood (UEA) – Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth (University of Virginia, 2019)

This book shines a light on the place of anecdote across a huge range of genres, helping us profoundly rethink the place of anecdote in eighteenth-century culture. It is equally at home parsing philosophy, print journalism, genre and media systems and individual works of poetry and prose. Like the anecdotes it attends to, small moments of insight and observation come to take on startling significance, and it moves impressively between textual and contextual readings. The monograph persuades us to embrace and admire the ‘unassimilable oddness’ of the anecdote and its place in narrative: both as impediment and spur.