The study of American literature

The lecture starts at 18:00 with registration from 17:30

Dr Owen Robinson is Senior Lecturer in US Literature at the University of Essex.  He is the author of Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction (Routledge, 2006), as well as several journal articles and book chapters on Faulkner.  With Richard Gray, he has co-edited A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Blackwell, 2004).  He is currently working on writing centred on New Orleans, as part of the AHRC-funded project American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, and recently co-edited Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (Liverpool University Press, 2013), as well as further articles and book chapters on New Orleans writing.  His book Myriad City: A Literary Geography of New Orleans is due to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2017.

Owen will be discussing the study of American literature: what makes it a set of distinct literary and cultural traditions, what links it to other regional and national literatures, and how its scholarship is changing in the current intellectual environment.