Robert Fraser FRSL (born 10 May 1947) [1] [2] is a British author and biographer.
Robert Fraser FRSL (born 10 May 1947) [1] [2] is a British author and biographer.
Fraser was born on 10 May 1947 in Surbiton, Surrey, the second son of Harry MacKenzie Fraser, a London solicitor, and Ada Alice Gittins of Pontypool in the county of Monmouthshire. His brother was Malcolm Fraser (1939–2012), Emeritus Professor of Opera at the University of Cincinnati and co-founder of the Buxton Festival. [3] At the age of eight, Robert Fraser won a choral scholarship to Winchester Cathedral, where he sang the daily services while studying at the Pilgrims School in the Close. Among his fellow choristers were the future newscaster Jon Snow [4] and international tenor Julian Pike. After attending Kingston Grammar School. Fraser went on to the University of Sussex to read English with David Daiches and Anthony Nuttall. He later wrote a doctorate on tradition in English poetry at Royal Holloway, University of London, where the college's famous gallery of Victorian paintings was to inspire his illustrated volume of poetry The Founders' Gift: Impressions from a Collection (2017). [5] Simultaneously with his doctorate he studied Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition at Morley College with Melanie Daiken and James Iliff.
Fraser began his teaching career at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, where he lectured from 1970 to 1974 before moving to the University of Leeds to teach under Geoffrey Hill. He subsequently held posts in the University of London and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in English until 1993, tutoring among others the novelist Belinda Starling [6] and the actor Alexander Armstrong.
Fraser is currently Emeritus Professor of English at the Open University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [7]
Fraser's choral background can be detected in his work for the stage, such as the performing translation of Domenico Cimarosa's opera Il pittor parigino performed at Buxton in 1989. [8] He has also published articles on the cultural and political contexts of the music of Purcell [9] and Handel [10] His comparative essays on literature and music are collected in Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism: Culture as Migration (2018). [11] He is the author of several biographical works for the theatre, including plays on the lives of the composer Carlo Gesualdo and of Byron. God's Good Englishman, his dramatic portrait of Samuel Johnson, opened at the Oxford Playhouse in 1984 and toured Britain with the actor Timothy West in its title role.
Academically, Fraser is both a Proust scholar and a specialist in the writing of his near namesake, the classicist and cultural anthropologist James George Frazer, on whom he has published several books, and the genesis of whose best known work on magic, religion and myth he charted in The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of An Argument. [12] A study in intellectual gestation, it was later integrated into the full "archive" edition of Frazer's magnum opus as a special introductory volume. [13] In 1994 he edited for the Oxford World's Classics a "new abridgement" of Frazer's classic that brought some of its most provocative ideas back into general circulation, including theories on Christianity and sacred prostitution. [14]
At the same time, he is a respected critic of the work of Marcel Proust, on whom he has published a much-cited study, [15] and spoken on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time. [16]
In the wider literary world, Fraser is principally associated with the life and work of certain twentieth-century British poets. In the early 1980s he conducted a dispute with Laura Riding, former consort of Robert Graves, who took issue with his review of her Collected Poems. [17]
In 1987, he edited the Collected Poems, and in 1995 the Selected Poems, of T. S. Eliot's protégé George Barker. [18] His life of Barker, The Chameleon Poet, [19] aroused opposition among some members of the poet's own family. [20] However, on its appearance in late 2001, it was warmly reviewed by the poets laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Andrew Motion, [21] and by the writers Anthony Thwaite, [22] Vernon Scannell, [23] Humphrey Carpenter [24] and Frederic Raphael; [25] it was chosen by the novelist D. J. Taylor as Spectator Book of the Year for 2002. [26]
In 2012, Fraser's biography of the poet David Gascoyne, Barker's lifelong friend, was published by the Oxford University Press. [27] The book was criticised in some quarters for devoting insufficient space to the darker side of Gascoyne's personality. "Fatally," remarked Paul Batchelor in The Times Literary Supplement, "Fraser has little time for introverts". [28] In marked contrast, reviewing the book for The Guardian, Iain Sinclair lauded it as "a witnessed romance of manners and slights, a landscape in which cold biographical facts are converted into metaphors of questing vision, delirium, breakdown". [29] In May the book was placed first in the Independent's chart of 10 best new biographies. [30] Fraser's own poetry is collected in Fox Hill in The Snow and other poems (2016). [31]
Fraser was one of the guiding spirits behind Heinemann Educational Book's celebrated African Writers Series, [32] and is a founding editor of the 35-year-old journal Wasafiri . [33] He has published a "critical history" of West African poetry, [34] along with monographs on Ben Okri [35] – a personal friend – and the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah. [36] During 2004–07, he travelled in India and Africa [37] researching a comparative account of publishing in those regions which appeared in 2008 as Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Re-Writing the Script. [38] The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book described this as "a highly nuanced, densely argued comparative study of the technologies of the intellect – speech, gesture and print – as they manifest themselves in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa", and concluded: "In an exposé of the necessary rapprochement between book history and postcolonialism Fraser counters the evolutionary telos of western print capitalism, challenges alphabetical literacy as the universal litmus test registering the impact of writing systems and print technologies, and disputes an indifferentiated approach to the history of the non-western book. He argues that communicative forms are multivalent, mutually constitutive, opportunistic and deeply implicated in their resistance to, or adaptation of, local cultural expressions." [39] Over the same period, Fraser co-edited with his friend Professor Mary Hammond of Southampton University a two-volume survey of international publishing entitled Books Without Borders. [40] In October 2005, in connection with this work, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society
Fraser has been described as a writer "who tries to keep one foot planted in, and the other well outside, academe". [41] Yale's Harold Bloom has noted his powers of comparative analysis, [42] and Harvard's Biodun Jeyifo has commended the "superb work" of "this meticulous scholar-critic". [43] The classicist Roger Just has also drawn attention to his "care, precision, good sense and…admirable lightness of touch.". [44] However, his writing has also given rise to vocal dissent, [45] adopting as he does a line that seems now radical, now trenchantly traditionalist. [46] His decision, in the words of John McLeod, "not to work with the niceties and orthodoxies of postcolonial theory" has on occasions given rise to sharply worded rejoinders. [47] He has little time for critical fashion and in 1999 coined the mocking term "Theocolonialism" to describe the subordination of independent judgement to passing fad, and the purported tendency among some academics in the field of literary studies to leap aboard noisy bandwagons. [48]
For 32 years, until her death in 2014, Fraser was married to the law lecturer Catherine Birkett. In 2018, he published Pascal's Tears: How Not to Murder One's Wife, a 270-page "opened letter" narrating the circumstances of her death, and meditating on the ethical, legal and religious implications of her treatment. [49] Their son is the theoretical physicist Dr Benedict Joseph ("Benjo") Fraser. Robert Fraser is now married to the biographer and food historian Dr Brigid Allen.
The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by the English writer Robert Graves. First published in 1948, the book is based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine; corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961. The White Goddess represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative and idiosyncratic perspective. Graves proposes the existence of a European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death", much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired and represented by the phases of the Moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies.
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial.
Sir James George Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.
Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries, originating from all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
Kofi Awoonor was a Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams, and was also published as Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. He taught African literature at the University of Ghana. Professor Awoonor was among those who were killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the Storymoja Hay Festival.
George Granville Barker was an English poet, identified with the New Apocalyptics movement, which reacted against 1930s realism with mythical and surrealistic themes. His long liaison with Elizabeth Smart was the subject of her cult-novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Sudeep Sen is an Indian English poet and editor.
Amatoritsero Ede is a Nigerian-Canadian poet. He had written under the name "Godwin Ede" but he stopped bearing his Christian first name as a way to protest the xenophobia and racism he noted in Germany, a "Christian" country, and to an extent, to protest Western colonialism in general. Ede has lived in Canada since 2002, sponsored as a writer-in-exile by PEN Canada. He was a Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, and has worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian trade publisher, Spectrum Books.
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion (2005), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
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.
"Piano and Drums" is a postcolonial poem by Nigerian poet Gabriel Okara.
Abdelwahab Meddeb was a French-language writer and cultural critic, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.
Wasafiri is a quarterly British literary magazine covering international contemporary writing. Founded in 1984, the magazine derives its name from a Swahili word meaning "travellers" that is etymologically linked with the Arabic word "safari". The magazine holds that many of those who created the literatures in which it is particularly interested "...have all in some sense been cultural travellers either through migration, transportation or else, in the more metaphorical sense of seeking an imagined cultural 'home'." Funded by the Arts Council England, Wasafiri is "a journal of post-colonial literature that pays attention to the wealth of Black and diasporic writers worldwide. It is Britain's only international magazine for Black British, African, Asian and Caribbean literatures."
Bahadur Tejani is a Kenyan poet, novelist, playwright and literary critic.
Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was previously Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender and sexual identities and the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism.
B. Kojo Laing or Bernard Kojo Laing was a Ghanaian novelist and poet, whose writing is characterised by its hybridity, whereby he uses Ghanaian Pidgin English and vernacular languages alongside standard English. His first two novels in particular – Search Sweet Country (1986) and Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) – were praised for their linguistic originality, both books including glossaries that feature the author's neologisms as well as Ghanaian words.
Anthony James Carrigan was a British academic noted for his pioneering work in combining the theoretical paradigms of postcolonialism and environmental studies.
Susheila Nasta, MBE, Hon. FRSL, is a British critic, editor, academic and literary activist. She is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, and founding editor of Wasafiri, the UK's leading magazine for international contemporary writing. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.
Daniel Karlin is a British literary scholar. He was educated at St Paul's School, London (1967-1970) and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied for his BA (1971-1974) and PhD (1975-1978). He was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford (1978-1980), and held appointments at University College London (1980-2004), Boston University (2005-2006), University of Sheffield (2006-2010), and University of Bristol (2010-2020), where he was Winterstoke Professor of English Literature. He retired in 2020 and was appointed Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Bristol. In the same year he was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy. His research interests include Romantic and Victorian poetry; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Henry James; Rudyard Kipling; Marcel Proust; and Bob Dylan.
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