E-mail address: Andrew.Monnickendam@uab.cat

Department & University: Department of English and German Studies, UAB

Brief summary of research interests:

My research concentrates on several interconnected areas. The first is the early historical novel, specifically that published in Scotland in the early decades of the nineteenth-century, particularly the work of Walter Scott and the Waverley Novels. From that point of departure, I have researched extensively on a similar but rather underestimated genre, the National Tale. This led me to examine the figure of Christian Isobel Johnstone, a contemporary of Scott, who also wrote historical fiction, in particular, the four volume Clan-Albin (1815), yet from a slightly different angle: a more rigorous approach to examining Highland life, an examination of conflict in a more European context, and a more overtly pacificist angle. I prepared the first modern edition of her novel.

The Historical Tale, as is common knowledge, deals extensively with national identity and nation-building or destruction: wars and their outcome decide the fate of the state. Hence, I have turned my attention to more recent accounts of conflict and their extension into periods of peace and general culture, as Clausewitz so astutely predicted would become the norm.

Selected publications:

  • 2023 (forthcoming) “Running into Memories in the Work of Viet Thanh Nguyen.”
  • 2016 .“The Trope of War in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song”. Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War: That Better Whiles May Follow Worse (eds Owen D & Pividori MC). Brill Rodopi; p. 81 – 90

  • 2013. The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations, Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone. Basingstoke. Palgrave-Macmillan

  • 2011. “The Scottish National Tale.”. The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (ed. Pittock M.) Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press; p. 100 – 111
  • 2007 Usandizaga, Aránzazu & Monnickendam, Andrew (eds) (2007). Back to Peace: Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. (Choice outstanding academic title)
  • 2003 (Edition, introduction & notes) Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Clan Albin. Glasgow: Association of Scottish Literary Studies.