New Statesman
As part of my interest in sharing academic scholarship with a broader audience beyond the university, I’ve published 2 shorter versions of author interviews with David Mitchell and Jon McGregor in the New Statesman. During the course of my research I’ve become fascinated with the way in which literary publishing is changing, and I think that the closer engagement between living writers and their academic critics and colleagues is producing a much more symbiotic mode of scholarship and shaping the way in which such writers enter into the process of canonisation.
I’ve been quizzed on my own research and its role in the process of literary canonisation – through the publication of journal articles and book chapters with academic presses, the inclusion of a younger generation of “pre-canonical” writers onto undergraduate and postgraduate university degree courses, the ordering of academic works into university libraries to support students’ own research projects, the engagement with living writers through dedicated conferences and interviews, and the dissemination of these research findings in digital platforms such as Alluvium. Given the harsh realities of literary publishing in the twenty-first century, many writers are connected in some way with universities – whether as part-time creative writing professors, or as visiting speakers – and I think it will be very interesting to see how these collaborations play out, alongside the increasing demands on writers to be visible and available; whether on twitter, blogs, or at music/culture festivals like Latitude.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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