I came to this book very much towards the end of my academic career. For many years, I had written on the Indian diaspora with, where possible, an emphasis on the old sugar plantation diaspora that began with the movement of coolies to work as indentured labourers in the nineteenth century. More recently, as I […]
In 2017, I wrote Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, identifying the disparities between 18 major biographies that reinvented Mary Wollstonecraft with each retelling of her life. In that book, I alluded to 16 other biographies as well with their diverging views on Wollstonecraft. To date, there are over 50 book-length biographies on […]
1.Why this book? Only 400,000 people worldwide speak Fiji Hindi. Of that number, less than half read the Devanagari (Sanskrit) script in which this language is written. There was then a challenge: How to expose this language to a wider readership? I chose to engage with the question of exposure through a close reading of […]
Now known chiefly for her dramatic life story and reforms of married women’s child custody and property legislation (see Antonia Fraser’s biography, The Case of the Married Woman and Diane Atkinson’s The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton), Caroline Norton was celebrated in her own day chiefly as a novelist, poet, lyricist and composer. She might […]
1. What is your main interest or what aroused your curiosity about contemporary memoirs, particularly in West Africa? I became interested in delving into the study of this area when I completed a part of my research for one of my books on auto-ethnography a few years ago. I found out that the creation of […]
Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed to have composed Don Quixote de la Mancha to combat the imaginative hold that books of chivalry had over his contemporaries. Reading the novel for the first time as an undergraduate, however, I had been instinctively drawn to the eponymous hero who decided to transform his own life into a […]
John Dewey argued in Art as Experience (1934/2005) that art is central to the sustainability of daily life. In doing so, he is not only talking about being a consumer of arts by attendance at events or exhibitions but the creation of the aesthetic dimension within our lives from arranging our homes and gardens, to […]
1 . What inspired you to write this book at this point in your research, which has covered a lot of ground from Thomas More and William Shakespeare to Jane Campion and the film adaptations of Māori writers such as Witi Ihimaera––passing through French cinema? Most of my published work has involved an exploration of […]
The guest author for this post is Thomas Recchio. He is the author of The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett: In “The World of Actual Literature” out May 2020. As I was writing my study of the novels of Francis Hodgson Burnett, the impact of a pandemic on individual lives, and by extension on society as a whole, […]
This is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Robinson. Author of Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts, out on Anthem Press this month. In the 1980s I first gained sympathy for the poetry of the “late” Wordsworth while helping to edit the “Last Poems” volume of the Cornell variorum. In between long spring and autumn […]
