My little brother’s second book is out, published by Oxford University Press:
Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature
It won’t be published in the States until April. It’s his second book (not counting all the ones he’s edited) and I predict it will be as well-received as his first. From the description provided by OUP:
Archaeology and literary studies are themselves products of the Renaissance. Although the two disciplines have sometimes viewed one another as rivals, they share a unique and unsettling intimacy with the traces of past life - with the words the dead wrote, sang, or heard, with the objects they made, held, or lived within. Schwyzer argues that at the root of both forms of scholarship lies the forbidden desire to awaken (and speak with) the dead. However impossible or absurd this desire may be, it remains a fundamental source of both ethical responsibility and aesthetic pleasure.
My sister Elizabeth is a dance journalist, and an archive of her reviews and commentaries are here.
My littlest sister, Diana, works for the State of California and is an environmental scientist; she’s especially interested in the economics of alternative power. She will save the rest of us.
My father has been gone some nine months now. I know he was very proud of his four kids, and in that crowded cloud of witnesses that watch over each of us, he is cheering us on.
Wow, Hugo, you have some kind of talented family. Your brother’s book sounds very interesting - the ways archaeology & literary theory overlap leads to some fascinating thoughts. I’ve been wanting to read “Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination” by Jennifer Wallace for ages, since I heard Ali Smith (one of my favourite fiction writers) credit it as the inspiration for HER book..