Peter D. McDonald | |
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| Employer | University of Oxford |
Peter D. McDonald was born in Cape Town in 1964 and educated in South Africa and England. [1] He is a Fellow of St. Hugh's College and Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of Oxford. [2]
McDonald presented reflections from his own biography in 2022 at the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania under the title, "The Secret Life of Books." The lectures have been recorded and are available and free to listen from a link at the site. [3] The elusive process of what leading book historian, Robert Darnton, calls ‘inner appropriation’ [4] that were the substance of McDonald's lectures were the basis of his 2024 volume, The Double Life of Books. [5]
In his 2017 book, Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing, [6] McDonald charts the intersections between fiction, cultural institutions and politics. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer characterized the book as "dizzying, its depth oceanic." [7]
To accompany the book McDonald maintains the website, "Artefacts of Writing: A site about language, writing, translation and thinking interculturally." [8] The site is an online forum and an exercise in digital curation.
McDonald has explored apartheid censorship South Africa in his 2009 study, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. [9] [10]
McDonald is the first researcher to review the archives of the Publications Control Board. His study reviews the impact of government post-publication control. "He analyses the role of censors, writers, publishers and booksellers; and presents a number of case studies." [11] Writing in the Mail & Guardian De Waal observed, "He also gives a full and enlightening account of the historical and political context and details matters from the perspectives of authors and publishers." [12]
The 2002 book, Making Meaning: 'Printers of the Mind' and Other Essays by D. F. McKenzie, which McDonald edited with Michael F. Suarez was published in the series, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book, by the University of Massachusetts Press. [13] The volume was characterized as effective, clear and even-handed. [14] [15]
In his 1997 monograph, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914, [16] McDonald reframed theories of Pierre Bourdieu about the literary cycle as a microcosm in which writers, critics, publishers, printers, distributors and readers act according to certain laws, established structures and codified practices. [17] He uses as case studies comparisons of Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett and Arthur Conan Doyle. [18]
McDonald, Peter D. The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader. 2024, Edinburgh University Press.
McDonald, Peter D. "Art as activism. Clearing a space for multiple, marginal voices: the writers' activism of PEN," and "Bugger universality:" an exchange with Antjie Krog / Antjie Krog and Peter D. McDonald," In Sandra Mayer, Ruth Scobie, eds. Authorship, Activism and Celebrity : Art and Action in Global Literature. 2023. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Pen International: An Illustrated History: Literature Knows No Frontiers, by Carles Torner, Jennifer Clement, Peter D. McDonald, Jan Martens, Ginevra Avalle, Rachel Potter, and Laetitia Zecchini, 2021. Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group. [19]
McDonald, Peter D. "On Method: African Materials," The Cambridge Quarterly,,, 49 (September 2020): 303–312.
McDonald, Peter D. "Seeing through the Concept of World Literature," Journal of World Literature 4, 1 (2019): 13-34.
McDonald, Peter D. Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing. 2017, First ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
McDonald, Peter D., "Coetzee's Critique of Language," pp. 160-179 in Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee, edited by Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm. 2017 First ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
McDonald, Peter D. “The Ethics of Reading and the Question of the Novel: The Challenge of J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 43, no. 3 (2010): 483–99.
McDonald, Peter D. “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?” PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 1 (2006): 214–28.
McDonald, Peter D. 2009. The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [20]
D. F. McKenzie (Author), Peter D. McDonald (Editor), Michael F. Suarez (Editor).Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays. 2002. Amherst Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press.
McDonald, Peter D. British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914. Cambridge, U.K.; Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize (twice), the CNA Literary Award (thrice), the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Antjie Krog is a South African writer and academic, best known for her Afrikaans poetry, her reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and her 1998 book Country of My Skull. In 2004, she joined the Arts faculty of the University of the Western Cape as Extraordinary Professor.
The poetry of South Africa covers a broad range of themes, forms and styles. This article discusses the context that contemporary poets have come from and identifies the major poets of South Africa, their works and influence.
Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres". Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".
Leah Price is an American literary critic who specializes in the British novel and in the history of the book. She is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. She has written essays on old and new media for The New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The Boston Globe.
Burger's Daughter is a political and historical novel by the South African Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Nadine Gordimer, first published in the United Kingdom in June 1979 by Jonathan Cape. The book was expected to be banned in South Africa, and a month after publication in London the import and sale of the book in South Africa was prohibited by the Publications Control Board. Three months later, the Publications Appeal Board overturned the banning and the restrictions were lifted.
South African literature is the literature of South Africa, which has 11 national languages: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Pedi, Tswana, Venda, Swazi, Tsonga and Ndebele.
July's People is a 1981 novel by the South African writer Nadine Gordimer. It is set in a near-future version of South Africa where apartheid is ended through a civil war. Unlike Gordimer's earlier work, the novel was ignored by the apartheid government's censor, though the book's South African publisher was later raided by the Security Police.
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 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.
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, having retired from the university in 2016, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford. Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo, the University of Sassari, the University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Wellesley College, and the University of Queensland.
Roger Chartier,, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Wietie was first published in 1980 by Christopher van Wyk and Fhazel Johennesse. The magazine provided a literary platform for the prevailing philosophy of Black Consciousness. It gave voice to a new generation of South African writers who saw their work not only as a critique on oppressive systems, but – like Black Power – as a weapon of transformation.
The Lives of Animals (1999) is a metafictional novella about animal rights by the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. The work is introduced by Amy Gutmann and followed by a collection of responses by Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger and Barbara Smuts. It was published by Princeton University Press as part of its Human Values series.
The Sandars Readership in Bibliography is an annual lecture series given at Cambridge University. Instituted in 1895 at the behest of Samuel Sandars of Trinity College (1837–1894), who left a £2000 bequest to the University, the series has continued to the present day. Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Lyell Lectures at Oxford University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series.
The McKenzie Lectures are a series of annual public lectures delivered by "a distinguished scholar on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts." The lectures are held in Oxford at the Centre for the Study of the Book. The series was inaugurated in 1996, in honour of Donald Francis McKenzie (1931–1999), upon his retirement as Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, University of Oxford.
Donald Pizer was an American academic and literary critic who was regarded as one of the principal authorities on the American naturalism literary movement. He was the Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus at Tulane University, and the author of numerous books on naturalism. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962.
Sarah Nuttall is a South African academic and cultural critic who is professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She was director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research from 2013 to 2022. She has published widely about post-apartheid South Africa, including on topics in literary theory, cultural theory, urban theory, and aesthetics.
The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures are an endowed lectureship in bibliography established in 1928 by rare-book and manuscript dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach at the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is Professor of English and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. He is editor-in-chief of the largest digital humanities project in the world: Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. He is a Jesuit priest.
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