The latest book by ON Philip Mosley (57-65), Resuming Maurice and Other Essays on Writers and Celebrity, will be published in April 2019 by Norwich publisher, Lasse Press. Philip is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Philip grew up in Norwich and attended Norwich School before obtaining his MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia. He is author of a number of books on literature and cinema, the most recent being The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism (2013).

His new book, Resuming Maurice, is a collection of personal essays on greater and lesser known writers whose lives and careers have sparked some of the author's own literary and historical interests. Drawing on the experience of a 40-year academic career, Philip introduces elements of personal narrative into his appreciations of this diverse set of authors whose backgrounds range from English (Vita Sackville West, Whitwell Elwin, George Barker, John Seymour, Virginia Haggard, J. K. Nettlefold), Welsh (Dylan Thomas) and American (Ned Washington) to Belgian (Maurice Maeterlinck), Danish (Karen Blixen), Mexican (Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos) and Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiong’o).

Corresponding to the growing academic subdiscipline of celebrity studies, a unifying theme of literary celebrity and its discontents runs throughout the volume. Chapter 1, ‘Resuming Maurice’, on Maeterlinck, is the capstone essay and includes a preamble on the celebrity theme. The essays on Barker, Elwin, Seymour and Nettlefold have strong East Anglian connections, while the one on Virginia Haggard invokes the Norfolk origin of her famous great-uncle, the Victorian novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard.

The book will be published in April and officially launched at the beginning of May. It will be available to buy from Lasse Press. You can find out more on their website.

Congratulations to Philip on his new publication!