University English honours Scholars in English Studies by awarding its Book Prize for Outstanding First Manuscript at the UE Spring Conference and AGM every year, followed by a published short list. Nominations for the Book Prize bring together books that demonstrate academic rigour and original and high-quality research.
https://universityenglish.ac.uk/book-prize/
Edmund Spenser and the Romance of Space (Manchester University Press, 2019)
This book develops an imaginative interpretive method by thinking through considerations of the spatial and movement between spaces. The monograph itself moves simultaneously through illuminating readings of Spenser’s poetry and its intertextual, historical and cultural contexts. It offers a topological account of real intellectual complexity, turning to horizons, edges, and impasses. There is an innovative use of intertexts, particularly cosmography and navigation, and it makes a compelling case for the persuasive and rhetorical power of Spenser’s ‘simultaneity of stories’. This is an outstanding work – original, rigorous, and a highly significant contribution to current literary studies.