Matthew Sangster
Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. President, @bars.bsky.social. New book: cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/…
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- But are you sure it's horrid?
- Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 42, and post the second sentence. 'He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levée, when he should have been attending upon us.'
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- Been reading Gene Wolfe's Castle of the Otter? He talks a fair bit about the Thor Power Tool decision in a fun, grumpy essay there.
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View full threadTry and work out the extent to which you write to think or think to write. Some people tend to need their thoughts in order before they start typing, others (me included) need to know a certain amount, but find out more about what they think through the process of getting words down.
- People who write to think should write early and often (but should also focus on good editing); people who think to write should try and avoid being made paranoid by others seeming to be ahead, and allow the time for working up ideas through reading and planning.
- Work out whether you write better at a certain time in the day and keep that time available. I write best late in the evening, but I know others who do their best work soon after waking.
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- Congratulations, James!
- If you fancy doing a Five Questions interview for the BARS Blog, please just drop me an email.
- The book I enjoyed most this year is Emily Tesh's The Incandescent. I also really enjoyed Adrian Tchaikovsky's Guns of the Dawn (one for both Fantasy nerds and Austen nerds) and Ursula Le Guin's Voices (and the Annals of the Western Shore more broadly).
- I learned a lot from Stefan Collini's Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain, which is also surprisingly vivid and wry considering its subject.
- The final deadline for proposals for Fantasy's Present Pasts (Glasgow, 23rd-25th June 2026) is this Friday (12th December). The abstracts we've received so far are very exciting - it's shaping up to be a really good programme. More information here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20....
- Just sent in my BARS 2026 proposal - if you haven't yet done so, you still have 59 minutes...
- Interesting article on the Royal Literary Fund, drawing on archival materials I catalogued at the British Library (as well as later papers still held at the Fund's offices): www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n....
- Index of the case files for those who first applied between 1790 and 1939 is here: www.rlfarchive.org.uk. Hopefully, the full set of catalogue records should be available again when the new BL manuscripts catalogue is up in a week or two.
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- Many thanks for your talk! Twas great to see you.
- Come visit our excellent Archives & Special Collections! Especially strong in eighteenth-century and Romantic-period books due to the copyright privilege. Awards cover costs up to £2500.
- 📣Our UofG Library Visiting Research Fellowships are now open for applications! We’re delighted to invite scholars from across the globe to apply to work with our internationally significant collections. Apply at: www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/li... 📆Closing date: 5 January 2026 #UofGLibraryFellows
- A reminder that we're hosting the first European Conference on the Fantastic, Fantasy's Present Pasts, in Glasgow next summer (23rd-25th June 2026). The Call for Papers and Sessions can be found here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20.... Closes 12th December. Please do consider submitting!
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- Coleridge in 1809: 'In the present age (emphatically the age of personality!) there are more than ordinary motives for withholding all encouragement from this mania, of busying ourselves with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease.'
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- It is a great joke. I think Peter Conradi read the two authors as being divisions of the things Murdoch feared she was or was seen as. There's certainly some very self-aware exaggerations of her quirks.
- I'd really recommend that you read The Black Prince in your Murdoch spree, but (if you haven't read it already) ideally only when you've read quite a few of her others, so you can appreciate what she's doing to herself!
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- Congratulations, Adrian! Hope the well-deserved pint was a good one.
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- Towards the longer side of novella, but Piranesi and This is How You Lose the Time War? Sofia Samatar's The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain (although that's resistance to serious oppression)? Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race? (Several of his would work.)
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- To be fair, if you were going to do a semester-long course on one Fantasy series, that's one from which students would take a lot away. I have a PhD student working on Nevèrÿon at the moment who keeps finding new interesting angles.
- I feel like it's a series designed to start a whole series of conversations genre studies really needs, and was in many respects blocked from starting those conversations in the eighties.
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- Will be interested to see what you make of Titus Alone. It's very different, and I think deliberately so. There are some really interesting drafts at the BL where he starts feeling it out in a form that's almost like a Samuel Beckett script.
- I think the useful part of the 'Virgil wrote Fan Fiction' thing is that it pushes against a geniuses-and-others model and towards one that recognises all culture is relational - a tissue of quotations, as Barthes puts it - and that's a good thing (and a thing genre's refreshingly honest about).
- So fan fiction is specific, but so is Roman epic. That's not to say that both can't cross cultures in weird and unexpected ways, though, or that some forms aren't more grounded in their specific circumstances than others.
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- The book touches on this at various points - I found Colin Burrow's book on the older sense of imitation illuminating for thinking about how senses of appropriate relationality have changed over time. Will take a look at the Jordan post - I enjoyed your writing on Peake, who's one of my faves.
- I think it's more interesting to say that fan fiction is a form that freely admits its intertextuality (cultural as well as literary), in a way that more self-consciously literary works have been cautious about post-Romanticism, but which is common in older literature and very important in genre.
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- I think that's a South Korean subgenre - Dallergut Dream Department Store etc?
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- Congratulations, Rhys! If you fancy doing a Five Questions interview for the BARS Blog to raise awareness, please just drop me an email.
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- Congratulations!
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- Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race uses two POVs very effectively.
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- The Word for World is Forest. The Overstory. Lord of the Rings.
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- You might want to talk with Alex Watson (Meiji University) or Laurence Williams (Sophia University) - they're both Romanticists who've been in Japan a long while, and would be will placed to give advice.
- Alex is @footnotesman.bsky.social here.
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- Congratulations, Tim - very well deserved!
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- Congratulations - well deserved!
- Enjoyed doing this interview with Sylvia Bishop for Five Books. I was asked to pick classic Fantasy books - choosing five was tough, as you can probably tell from both the length and all the side mentions...: fivebooks.com/best-books/c...
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- Thank you for writing such a brilliant book
- For those interested in writers' lives (and particularly their tribulations), the Royal Literary Fund has now made available an index covering over 3,600 case files for authors who first applied between 1790 and 1939, based on my catalogue for the British Library: www.rlfarchive.org.uk.
- This can be used to find the case file numbers necessary to request materials at the BL while the manuscripts catalogue remains down (although there are significant RLF materials it doesn't cover, such as the annual reports and anniversary dinner papers).
- The A-Z (www.rlfarchive.org.uk/authors/) covers authors who applied themselves or whose dependents applied after their deaths, but there are a lot of interesting recommenders and advocates who can be found with a name search - Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats (for James Joyce)...
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- Names first (personal and works), then the core concepts of the book - the stuff you really want people to be able to find. Reading for core concepts lets you check you've caught all the names.
- Don't over-index - they're less heavily used than they used to be before CTRL-F. An index that shows what you see as the most important ideas in the book is probably more helpful than one that tries to anticipate every possible use.
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- Perhaps worried about the role being an antagonist with fairly limited stage time? A bit of a change-up from romantic leads such as Juliet and (Dryden's) Cleopatra and the other roles she'd played previously. Could be seen as a demotion down the playbill.
- Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900 is now available as a relatively affordable paperback from CUP. Jon and I are really happy with the fourteen excellent intersecting essays our contributors prepared - do consider picking the book up if you work in the area: www.cambridge.org/core/books/i....
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- Concur with others on liking the Winter's Tale one.
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- Robert Fergusson, by some accounts. There's certainly a queer reading of James Hogg's Justified Sinner, although that's a bit later. Faerie ballads?
- Some strong contenders here - don't envy the judges this choice.
