Resuming Maurice Format: Paperback. This item is unavailable.Resuming Maurice Format: Paperback

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 'Pre-amble' 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. The collection aims at the 'common reader' (in Virginia Woolf 's sense), a broad audience of literary enthusiasts and especially those interested in how literary history and criticism, biography and memoir, and celebrity studies may intersect in productive and engaging ways.

Philip Mosley is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has been an Associate Editor of Comparative Literature Studies and has served on the board of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. His recent book publications include a translation of François Jacqmin's 'The Book of the Snow' (2010), shortlisted for the international Griffin Poetry Prize, 'The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism' (2013), and 'Resuming Maurice and Other Essays on Writers and Celebrity' (2020). Additionally, he has translated a number of Belgian authors from French to English including Guy Vaes (October Long Sunday, 1997), Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte, 2007, a cult decadent novel that has sold over 2K copies), and Maurice Maeterlinck (The Intelligence of Flowers, 2008, 1400+ copies sold). He was awarded the 2008 Literary Translation Prize by the French Community of Belgium in recognition of his contribution to the dissemination of Belgian francophone literature. He also writes occasionally for music magazines on jazz, 60s soul, and 50s rock 'n' roll. A native of England who immigrated to the USA in 1988, he holds a BA in English from the University of Leeds, an MA in European Literature and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from the University of East Anglia. In 2000, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Toulouse, France; in 2003-04 was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; and in 2013 was Visiting Professor at the University College of Sint-Lukas, Brussels, Belgium.