Publication of the week: Professor John Drew

16 June 2014

John Drew, “Reasons to be Cheerful: Leigh Hunt and his Versatile, Trenchant, Observant, Empathetic, Witty Journalism”, in Richard Lance Keeble & John Tulloch (eds), Global Literary Journalism. Exploring the Journalistic Imagination, vol. 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 19-34.  ISBN: 978-1-4331-2469-3 (pbk).

global-literary-journalism-As Professor Drew notes in the opening chapter of this new anthology of critical essays, the figure of James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) is, like many of his occasional essays, quaintly historical, manifestly that of a Dead White European Male, who plied his trade in London and is best known to scholars of the British Romantic movement. Hunt is therefore a curious object of inquiry to bring into focus at the start of a collection of essays seeking to extend coverage and understanding of literary journalism as a global phenomenon, and render the field less open to the charge of Occidentalism. Nevertheless, as Professor Drew argues, the sense of distance, of impertinence even, allows Hunt’s long struggle for critical freedom to be read almost as an allegory of contemporary difficulties encountered by the journalistic imagination worldwide as it responds to external pressures and oppression, and as it attempts to give more than merely functional form and shape to events that demand to be recorded. The chapter comprises a critical survey of Hunt’s journalistic writings and career until 1832, the year in which much of what he campaigned for was crystallised by the so-called Great Reform Act – and the year in which he probably met the as-yet-unknown Charles Dickens. Drew’s essay concludes with a postscript inviting closer scrutiny of the interrelationships between the two writers: a scrutiny which, Drew predicts, will in no way work to Hunt’s disfavour.

Read about the book on the Peter Lang website.

John Drew is Professor of English at The University of Buckingham and Director of Dickens Journals Online.  If you would like to read his chapter on Leigh Hunt, please email him at: john.drew@buckingham.ac.uk.