Professor Nikolaj Lübecker nominated for R. Gapper Book Prize

Nikolaj Lübecker, Professor of French and Film Studies, published Twenty-First-Century Symbolism (Liverpool University Press, 2022) to offer new critical readings of the nineteenth-century French poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé and to show how these poets might speak, outside their historical context, to our present.

Drawing on recent media-theory, haiku poetry, cybernetics, and experimental films, among many other things, Twenty-First-Century Symbolism argues that Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé prefigure a view of human subjectivity that is appropriate for our times: human beings both mediate and are mediations of the environments we traverse and that traverse us, whether these are natural, urban, linguistic, or technological environments.

The R. Gapper Book Prize is awarded by the Society for French Studies, the oldest learned association for French Studies in the UK and Ireland to a book in the field of French studies, published for the first time in the previous calendar year, by a scholar based in an institution of higher education in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The award commends books of critical and scholarly distinction, which have a clear impact on the wider critical debate.

Many congratulations to Nikolaj on this nomination.

The winner will be announced at the Society for French Studies conference in Stirling at the beginning of July.

Read more about Twenty-First-Century Symbolism and Professor Lübecker’s work in this blog.