Professor%20Peter%20D%20McDonald: List of publications
Showing 1 to 61 of 61 publications
The Double Life of Books
February 2024
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Book
Clearing a Space for Multiple, Marginal Voices: The Writers' Activism of PEN
July 2023
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Chapter
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Authorship, Activism and Celebrity
‘Bugger Universality: An Exchange with Antjie Krog’
July 2023
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Chapter
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Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature
‘Bugger universality’: an exchange with Antjie Krog
May 2023
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Chapter
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Authorship, Activism, and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature
Antjie Krog is a South African poet, translator and academic. Professor in the Arts at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, she has published widely in Afrikaans and English, including the poetry books Jerusalemgangers (1985) and Lady Anne (1989), and the prose works Country of My Skull (1998) and Conditional Tense: Memory and Vocabulary after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2013). ’n Vry vrou: Gedigte van Antjie Krog, a collection of her poems edited by Karen de Wet, was published in 2020. This email exchange with Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford, took place in August 2020.
The Literature Police
December 2022
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Conference paper
Shadows and ghosts: The evolution of the PEN Charter
October 2021
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Internet publication
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Literary space/creative practice: Reading Ityala Lamawele in English today
July 2021
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Journal article
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Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
The new English translation of SEK Mqhayi's Ityala Lamawele (1914), The Lawsuit of the Twins (2018), is a major cultural event. Seen against the background of Ityala Lamawele's long and complex history as a published work, however, the new translation raises several important questions for readers today. Above all, by bringing the tensions between the intermediaries who shape the space of the literary and the creative practice of writers sharply into focus, it obliges readers to ask who conceptualises the literary, by what means, and to what effect? The article concludes by considering how the new translation creates opportunities for rethinking Anglograph literary and African studies in productive ways.
Beyond Professionalism: The Pasts and Futures of Creative Criticism
September 2019
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Chapter
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The Critic as Amateur
Seeing through the concept of World Literature
March 2019
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Journal article
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Journal of World Literature
Less concerned with the concept of World Literature than with the promise and perils of conceptualization, this essay considers what experiencing some forms of writing as world literature might involve. Using J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977) as an illustrative example, it addresses questions of circulation, translation, writing systems, book history, and literary geography in the context of recent academic debates about world literary studies. It concludes by revisiting Rabindranath Tagore’s landmark 1907 essay “World Literature,” arguing that it remains an indispensable guide to experiential reading and anti-conceptual thinking.
FFR
Beyond the Ancient Quarrel
February 2018
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Book
In Plato's Republic, Socrates spoke of an 'ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy' which he offered to resolve once and for all by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and out of the ancient quarrel there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J.M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged with academic literary theory, his fiction has done so in a way that has tended to disorient rather than affirm those same theories, wrong-footing the normal processes of literary interpretation.
This volume brings together philosophers and literary theorists to reflect upon the challenge Coetzee has made to their respective disciplines, and to the disciplinary distinctions at stake in the ancient quarrel. The essays use his fiction to explore questions about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism; the relationship between literature, theology, and post-secularism; the particular ways in which literature engages reality; how literature interacts with the philosophies of language, action, subjectivity, and ethics; and the institutions that govern the distinctions between literature and philosophy. It will be of importance not only to readers of Coetzee, but to anyone interested in the ancient quarrel itself.
Coetzee’s Critique of Language
December 2017
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Chapter
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Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee
Artefacts of Writing
October 2017
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Book
Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds, including professional literary critics. In Artefacts of Writing, Peter D. McDonald argues they pose as much of a challenge to the way states conceptualise language, culture, and community. Drawing on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the identity of the English language to the constitutional debates about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from the quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations in the interwar years to UNESCO's ongoing struggle to articulate a viable concept of diversity, McDonald brings together a large ensemble of legacy writers, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and with the policy-makers who shaped the formation of modern states and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the 1940s. In the second part of the book, he reflects on the continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Es'kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions concerning education, literacy, human rights, translation, indigenous knowledge, and cultural diversity that have preoccupied UNESCO since 1945.
At once a novel contribution to institutional and intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique perspective on literature's place at the centre of some of the most fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today
Literary Criticism
On strong opinions: celebrity authors and the contemporary agora
February 2017
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Journal article
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Celebrity Studies
Semper Aliquid Novi: Reclaiming the future of book history from an African perspective
January 2017
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Journal article
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Book History
The study of books has a complex genealogy that can be traced back at least to the nineteenth century, especially if we bear in mind the long history of British bibliography. Yet it was only when an international group of historians, literary scholars, bibliographers, sociologists and librarians began to coordinate their various activities in the 1960s and 1970s that the “history of the book” emerged as a distinct scholarly enterprise, and it was only in the following decade that it started to see itself as a discipline in the making.
'What about criticism?'
November 2016
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Chapter
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Literary Activism Perspectives
Blanchot’s Giant-Windmill
Literary Collections
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and the Interplay of Languages
March 2016
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Chapter
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A History of Indian Poetry in English
This book is of pivotal importance to the development of Indian poetry in English and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
Literary Criticism
The Homeric Hymns
February 2016
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Book
A 2016 Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. The Homeric Hymns are a crucial work in the Western literary canon, and Peter McDonald's new verse translations offer the major modern account of this still under-appreciated body of ancient poetry. The thirty-three 'hymns' are poetic accounts of ancient Greek gods, including Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Poseidon. Some of the poems are micro-epics in their own right, recounting the lives and affairs of the divine; taken together, they form a meditation on the primal themes of love, war, betrayal, desire, and paternity, and contemplate the dangerous proximity of gods and men. The book includes a new translation of the 'Life of Homer', a narrative incorporating the shorter poems known as Homer's Epigrams, attributed to Pseudo-Herodotus. Two appendices provide verse translations of episodes from Homer's Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony, while McDonald gives fresh versions throughout of relevant passages from Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and other Greek poets. The accompanying notes and commentaries on the poems are the most generous and authoritative of any translation. This book revives an ancient classic for the twenty-first century.
Ancient Greek poetry, Translation
Libellous Literature: Elton John and the Perils of Close Reading
January 2016
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Chapter
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Literary Trials Exceptio Artis and Theories of Literature in Court
From the 19th century onwards, famous literary trials have caught the attention of readers, academics and the public at large. Indeed it is striking that more often than not, it was the texts of renowned writers that were dealt with by the courts, as for example Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal in France, James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in the Us, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in Great-Britain, up to the more recent trials on Klaus Mann's Mephisto and Maxim Biller's novel Esra in Germany.
By bringing together international leading experts, Literary Trials represents the first step towards a systematic discussion of literary trials on a global scale. Beginning by first reassessing some of the most famous of these trials, it also analyses less well-known but significant literary trials. Special attention is paid to recent developments in the relationship between literature and judicature, pointing towards an increasing role for libel and defamation in the societal demarcation of what literature is, and is not, allowed to do.
Literary Criticism
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ?
January 2016
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Journal article
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Communications
Quelle littérature ? Quelle démocratie ? Quel espace public ? Les leçons de l'année 1988 en Afrique du Sud Cet article analyse la confrontation tendue entre Nadine Gordimer et John Maxwell Coetzee sur Les Versets sataniques de Salman Rushdie dans les derniers temps de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud. Il pointe la pertinence particulière de leurs différences d'opinion, centrées sur les questions de littérature, de démocratie et d'espace public, dans les débats actuels sur la liberté d'expression.<br/><br/> Whose literature ? Whose democracy ? Which public space ? The lessons of 1988 in South Africa This article reflects on a fraught confrontation over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) between Nadine Gordimer and John Maxwell Coetzee in the dying days of apartheid in South Africa. It argues that their differences of opinion, which centred on the questions of literature, democracy and public space, have a particular relevance to contemporary debates about the freedom of expression.
'That Monstrous Thing': The Critic as Censor in Apartheid South Africa
August 2015
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Chapter
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Censorship and the Limits of the Literary A Global View
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
Literary Criticism
Instituting (World) Literature
July 2015
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Chapter
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Institutions of World Literature
History
The Present is Another Country: A Comment on the 2010 Media Freedom Debate
Interventions: international journal of postcolonial studies
Nelm
December 2010
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Journal article
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English Studies in Africa
Government Censorchip Vs. Monoplistic Control: The Deformations of African Literary Publishing in the Apartheid Era
January 2010
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Chapter
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The Influence of D. F. McKenzie
The Ethics of Reading and the Question of the Novel: The Challenge of JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year
January 2010
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Journal article
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Novel: A Forum on Fiction
The Ethics of Reading and the Question of the Novel: The Challenge of JM Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year
January 2010
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Journal article
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Novel
The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences
January 2009
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Book
Modernist Publishing: “Nomads and Mapmakers"
April 2008
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Chapter
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A Concise Companion to Modernism
The book consists of twelve chapters written by leading scholars, each spotlighting ideas emanating from a particular field which helped to shape Modernism, including eugenics, primitivism, Freudianism, and Nietzscheanism.
Literary Criticism
Guardians of the Emergent Volk Avant Garde: N.P van Wyk Louw, the Apartheid Censors, and the Sestigers, 1963-68
January 2008
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Journal article
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Stilet
Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties
January 2008
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Journal article
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Journal of Victorian Culture
Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?
January 2006
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Journal article
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PMLA
The Writer, the Censor, and the Critic: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature
January 2006
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Chapter
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J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Book History and Discipline Envy
March 2004
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Journal article
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The European English Messenger
THE POLITICS OF OBSCENITY: LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER AND THE APARTHEID STATE
January 2004
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Journal article
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English Studies in Africa
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Disgrace Effects
September 2002
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Journal article
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Interventions
British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914
May 2002
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Book
This book examines the early publishing careers of three highly influential writers, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
History
Interventions Journal Special Edition
January 2002
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Other
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Interventions
Making Meaning "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays
January 2002
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Book
This volume, edited by two of McKenzie's former students, brings together a wide range of his writings on bibliography, the book trade and the "sociology of texts"
Literary Collections
Engaging Undergraduates in Research
Conference paper
Interventions Journal Special Issue on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Other
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Interventions
Invited Guest Lecture
Conference paper
Invited paper
Conference paper
Literature and Material Text
Conference paper
Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?
Conference paper
Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?
Conference paper
Literature and the Social Sciences: An Awkward Alliance?
Conference paper
Openspires
Conference paper
Plenary Lecture
Conference paper
Policing Expression
Conference paper
Policing Literature in Apartheid South Africa
Conference paper
Rabindranath Tagore’s সমাজ/Samaj/Communities of Song
Chapter
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Rethinking Lyric Communities
Reading in the ’World’ Today
Conference paper
Samuel Beckett and John Calder
Chapter
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Beckett and His Publishers
The Book in South Africa
Chapter
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Cambridge History of South African Literature
The Institution of Literature
Conference paper
Translating Europe
Conference paper
Under the shadow of the Monument: on first looking into Finnegans Wake