Project Summary
This project is hosted by: Institute of English Studies
- Research interests:
- Communities, Classes, Races, English Literature, History of the book
- Regions:
- Africa, Africa, Asia, Asia, Australasia, Australasia, Caribbean, Caribbean, Europe, Europe, Middle East, Middle East, North America, North America, South America, South America, United Kingdom, United Kingdom
- Project period:
- 01-Feb-2023 - 31-Jan-2025
- Project categories:
- Fellowship grant
- Project summary:
My postdoctoral project will explore the postwar arrival in London of the Anglophone immigrants who reinvented the literary capital’s publishing houses and magazines. This subject is ripe for investigation—as the treatment of the Windrush generation is newly contested and as climate change accelerates flows of human migration. It is also fresh, since academic criticism has instead largely focused on Anglophone writing in the hands of longstanding British publishers. From a number of possible editors, I have chosen four whose impact encompasses the diversity of English literatures, but whose careers have not yet been studied in scholarly depth. Drawing on the rich and understudied publishers’ archives in the British Library, I will reconstruct the histories of their institutions, unfold their creative relationships with an array of authors, and develop fresh interpretations of celebrated novels. I will ask how the institutions’ hybrid identities influenced the writers they cultivated and the works they released. And I will determine how this reversal of the established balance of editorial power altered the production and reception of English writing worldwide—the field that has recently come to be known as the ‘Global Anglophone’. Thus, ‘Migrant Editors’ will illuminate the complexities of contemporary British identity while transforming our understanding of the postwar development of literatures in English.
Management Details
Lead researcher & project contact:
| Name | Position | Institute | Organisation | Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dr Ben Fried | Institute of English Studies | School of Advanced Study, University of London | ben.fried@sas.ac.uk |
Funding:
| Funder | Grant type | Award |
|---|---|---|
| The British Academy | Newton International Fellowship | £119,139.00 |