Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones is the winner of the University English Book Prize 2022. The judges write:
‘This is an exceptional book that combines a wealth and depth of scholarship with an engaging writing style that draws even the non-specialist reader in. Focussed on The Anathemata, a work published by Faber in 1952 by autodidact, artist, and poet David Jones, it demonstrates through meticulous examination of archival materials and annotations from the Anglo-Saxon Library as well as from previously unexamined correspondence, the extent to which acts of reading and creative critical thinking on Jones’s part underpinned production of The Anathemata, a culturally and linguistically composite text that uses translation as a means of cultural renewal.
It makes an original contribution to both Medieval Studies and Modernism, the former in respect of Jones’s engagement with Old English which Brooks shows to have had ‘a far greater influence … than previously recognized’ on his work, the latter in respect of the archival turn in New Modernist Studies. It combines archival research and genetic criticism with a nuanced understanding of creative process […]
Uncovering a richly hybrid heritage that transcends national categories, this is an important book not just for modernist scholars in general but for anyone thinking about literary identity.’
Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones is published as part of the Textual Perspectives Series with Oxford University Press. You can find out more and order a copy here.
The book has also been reviewed by Catherine Enwright for The Journal of Modern Literature and Paul Robichaud for Modern Philology.
Summary of the book:
The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952).
At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.
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Francesca Brooks 