WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 30 minutes (+ 10 minutes for discussion).
Christopher Joby
Department of Dutch and South African Studies
The two worlds of John Cruso, an author of Flemish heritage in Renaissance England
Chris Joby introduces the early modern Anglo-Dutch author, John Cruso (b. 1592). Cruso’s parents came from Hondschoote in present-day French Flanders, but he was born in the Flemish migrant community in Norwich. After attending Norwich free grammar school, he became a successful cloth merchant. He wrote Dutch and English verse, published English prose works and translations from French and Dutch on military matters, was a militia captain, church elder and pater familias. An analysis of Cruso’s life and works allows Dr. Joby to discuss current areas of interest in early modern studies such as the migrant experience, multilingualism, and identity formation. He argues that Cruso employed his skills as a multilingual, a builder of social and literary networks, and an author conversant with the canon of classical and Renaissance literature in order to construct an identity that tried to hold together, and in some sense reconcile, the Low Countries donor culture of his parents with the recipient culture of England, where he lived, worked and wrote. In doing so, he provides a rare analysis of how an author with a migrant background shaped his identity. This is important, not least because according to one account “at least one-third or even half of all early modern Europeans changed their places of residence at least once in their lives”.
Dominika Buchowska-Greaves
Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics
Avant-Garde discourse in The New Age magazine
The presentation will discuss the essays on art criticism which appeared in The New Age magazine in the first decades of the twentieth century. The New Age published in London from 1907 - 1922 by Alfred R. Orage, addressed modern politics, literature and art, with contributions from Ezra Pound, Beatrice Hastings, H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read, G. K. Chesterton, H. Belloc, and Arnold Bennett, whose work was often first published on its pages. Its emphasis on the promotion of modernist and avant-garde cultural experiments made it an important platform for publicity and debate within the modernist public sphere and avant-garde discourse. The presentation analyses the reception of art in The New Age in the context of British cultural history. Treating art criticism as a literary genre, it traces the journal’s art reviews from artists (e.g. Walter Sickert), writers (e.g. T. E. Hulme) and professional art critics (Huntly Carter), as well as examines literature inspired by modern art. It examines critical discourse to review arts events showing how these texts argue for the introduction and justify the existence of avant-garde modernist art in Britain. Focusing on the main idea behind The New Age – to enhance negotiation and dialogism between various factions of modernity – the resulting arguments, clashes and controversies are revealed.