This is a collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of Philip Mosley’s own literary and historical interests. Drawing on the experience of a forty-year academic career, he also introduces elements of personal narrative into his appreciations of this diverse set of authors whose backgrounds range from English (Vita Sackville West, Whitwell Elwin, George Barker, John Seymour, Virginia Haggard, J.K. Nettlefold), Welsh (Dylan Thomas) and American (Ned Washington) to Belgian (Maurice Maeterlinck), Danish (Karen Blixen), Mexican (Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos), and Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiong’o). Corresponding to the growing academic sub-discipline of celebrity studies, a unifying theme of literary celebrity and its discontents runs throughout the volume. Chapter 1, ‘Resuming Maurice,’ on Maeterlinck, is the capstone essay and includes a ‘Preamble’ on the celebrity theme. The essays on Barker, Elwin, Seymour, and Nettlefold have strong East Anglian connections, while the one on Virginia Haggard invokes the Norfolk origin of her famous great-uncle, the Victorian novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, Philip Mosley grew up in Norwich, UK, attended Norwich School, and obtained his MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia. He is author of a number of books on literature and cinema, the most recent being The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism (2013). He was awarded the Prix de la Traduction in 2008 by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation for his translations of works by Belgian francophone authors, most recently that of François Jacqmin, whose Book of the Snow (2010) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
April 2020, 140 pages
ISBN 978-0-8023-1364-5 Paperback $19.00