Paul Keen receives 2011 Research Achievement Award
Paul Keen receives 2011 Research Achievement Award
Paul Keen says you might be surprised what you can find out by reading 18th century literature. And he’s about to tell all in a new anthology.
“This collection will offer a groundbreaking account that challenges people to reconsider their understanding of this period in fundamental ways,” says Keen. “It highlights the enormous wit and resourcefulness with which a writers from across a range of social perspectives were responding to the challenge of forging new ideas about what literature was, and why it matters, in ways that responded to the transformative power of Britain’s commercial revolution in this age.”
Paul Keen
The professor and chair of the English Department, received a Carleton University 2011 Research Achievement Award.
He is focusing on how 18th-century authors responded to an era of commercial upheaval.
“These questions still resonate with us today,” says Keen. “Questions like: What types of writing were relevant to a thriving commercial nation? What did it mean to be an author in this busy modern world, and what sorts of social distinction should authors expect to enjoy? And how were these issues affected by wider debates about the impact of rapid technological change?”
Keen is highlighting how these literary debates were influenced by broader social questions. “I wanted to know what it really means to inhabit a world of intellectual curiosity and fashionable indulgence, rational enlightenment and modish distraction, social progress and commercial opportunism,” he says.
His last anthology Revolutions in Romantic Literature was enthusiastically reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement. He has received several grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), allowing him to explore topics such as Literature, Commerce and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750-1800, the title of his other new book, due out this year.
To watch an interview with Keen http://carleton.ca/newsroom/news-releases/carleton-professor-paul-keen-honoured-with-2011-research-achievement-award/