Poetry & Money: A Speculation

Professor Peter Robinson, Department of English Literature, University of Reading

This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Palmer Building Room G02 and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-money-a-speculation-tickets-228788541687

Poetry & Money: A Speculation (Liverpool University Press, 2020) is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It explores how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the economic revolution, debates over metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value.

For his presentation of work from this book, Peter Robinson will concentrate on two sections inspired by materials held in Special Collections at the University of Reading, namely documents connected with the publication of Translations from the Night by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo in the Heinemann African Writers series, and an anonymous Jacobite Ode on the South Sea Bubble.

Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He holds degrees from the universities of York and Cambridge. Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is the author of many books, especially of poetry and translation, for some of which he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations.

This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and on the University of Reading campus, room G02, Palmer Building http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/maps/whiteknights-campus-map.pdf (Building number 26 on this map).