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Graham Holderness is a writer and critic who has published as author or editor 60 books, mostly on Shakespeare, and hundreds of chapters and articles of criticism, theory and theology. He was one of the founders of British Cultural materialism, a pioneer of critical-creative writing, and a significant contributor to interdisciplinary work in Literature and Theology.
Holderness was born in Meanwood, Leeds, where he was educated at local state schools, including Leeds Modern School. He attended Jesus College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Degree in English language and literature. and a postgraduate degree in 19th-century literature and society. He obtained an MPhil degree in literature from the Open University, and a PhD in drama from the University of Surrey. He also has a higher doctorate (D.Litt.) in English, and a doctorate in literature and theology. During his academic career he has taught at the Open University, Oxford, Roehampton and Hertfordshire, becoming its professor of English.
He is acknowledged as a formative contributor to a number of branches of Shakespeare criticism and theory:
Holderness published the first full-length Marxist study of D. H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (Macmillan, 1982). [9] A pioneer of "cultural Materialism", Holderness demonstrates "an interest in historical cultural change by evaluating contemporary television and film versions of Shakespeare's plays or by examining the image of Shakespeare fostered by our British educational system." In doing so, he seeks to counter "conservative views of early post-Second World War theatres and academics and to raise awareness that all textual appropriation and examination have a political dimension." [10]
He has published pioneering studies in Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, culminating in The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy by Sulayman Al Bassam (Methuen Drama, 2014), [11] and research in Christian literature and theology, in journals such as Harvard Theological Review, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Literature and Theology, and Renaissance and Reformation.
Graham Holderness is also a novelist, poet and dramatist. His novel The Prince of Denmark [12] was published in 2001; his poetry collection Craeft [13] received a Poetry Book Society award in 2002; and his play Wholly Writ was in 2011 performed at Shakespeare's Globe, and by Royal Shakespeare Company actors in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His more recent work has pioneered methods of critical-creative writing, exemplified by his innovative factual-fictional biography Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011), [14] which pairs critical chapters on biographical themes, with short stories on the same topic, written in styles as diverse as those of Dan Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway and Jonathan Swift. Extending these methods, and published in 2014, are Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, June 2014), [15] which includes a story about Shakespeare's Richard II being performed on board the ship the Red Dragon during the Third Voyage of the East India Company, and a re-writing of Coriolanus as a James Bond adventure; and Re-writing Jesus: Christ in 20th Century Fiction and Film (Bloomsbury, November 2014), [16] which incorporates a new historical life of Jesus, Ecce Homo. May 2014 sees the publication of a historical fantasy novel on Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot, Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2014).
His most recent book is The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Hudson, November 2016).
Holderness is General Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Critical Survey; [17] an elected Fellow of the English Association, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Royal Society of Medicine].
Holderness is an Anglican Christian. He is a sub-deacon at the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park, an Anglo-Catholic Church of England church. [18]
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English philosopher, literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Modern Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from the post-critical orientation of later scholarship; and from the multiple distinct schools of criticism into which it evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Jonathan G Dollimore is a British philosopher and critic in the fields of Renaissance literature, gender studies, queer theory, history of ideas, death studies, decadence, and cultural theory. He is the author of four academic books, a memoir, and numerous academic articles. With Alan Sinfield he was the co-editor of and key contributor to Political Shakespeare, and the co-originator of the critical practice known as cultural materialism. Dollimore is credited with making major interventions in debates on sexuality and desire, Renaissance literary culture, art and censorship, and cultural theory.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
Steven Kevin Connor, FBA is a British literary scholar. Since 2012, he has been the Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was formerly the academic director of the London Consortium and professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
Bart Denton Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Cyrus R. K. Patell is a literary and cultural critic who writes and teaches on World literature with a focus on US literature. He is currently Professor of English at New York University (NYU) and Global Network Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he previously served as Associate Dean of Humanities.
Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism espouses analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature, history and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.
Andrew John Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
Stanley E. Porter is an American-Canadian academic and New Testament scholar, specializing in the Koine Greek grammar and linguistics of the New Testament.
Jeremy Tambling is a British writer and critic. He was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. His most recent position is Professor of English at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw (2019).
Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His research and teaching focuses on the relations among space, narrative, and representation, particularly in U.S. and comparative literature, and he is active in the emerging scholarly fields of geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities. Tally is the editor of "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," a Palgrave Macmillan book series established in 2013. The translator of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces and the editor of Geocritical Explorations, In addition to his numerous essays on literature, criticism, and theory, Tally has written books on Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, as well as a critical introduction to the work of literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson.
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
University of Hertfordshire Press was formed in 1992 as the publishing wing of the University of Hertfordshire. Its first publication was a book celebrating the institution's change in status from polytechnic to university. Our Heritage was a short history of the campuses of the new university, written by Anthony Ralph Gardner, a member of staff from the Library and Media Services Department.
In literary criticism and cultural studies, postcritique is the attempt to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Such methods have been characterized as a "hermeneutics of suspicion" by Paul Ricœur and as a "paranoid" or suspicious style of reading by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Proponents of postcritique argue that the interpretive practices associated with these ways of reading are now unlikely to yield useful or even interesting results. As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident." A postcritical reading of a literary text might instead emphasize emotion or affect, or describe various other phenomenological or aesthetic dimensions of the reader's experience. At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion."
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