Contact: R.Fraser@open.ac.uk
Robert Fraser is a biographer and critic, dramatist and historian of ideas. He has published on Marcel Proust ( Proust and the Victorians, 1994), Victorian Quest Romance (for the Writers and Their Work Series, 1998) and Ben Okri (Ben Okri: Towards the Invisible City, 2002). The Making of the Golden Bough, his study of the genesis of Sir James Frazer’s anthropological classic, has recently been re-issued as an additional volume to the grand thirteen volume set of Sir James’s work. The Chameleon Poet, his biography of the British poet George Barker, was released by Jonathan Cape in February 2002 and was chosen as Spectator book for that year. Night Thoughts, his biography of the poet David Gascoyne (1916-2001), will be issued by Oxford University Press in January 2012.
A member of the university’s Literature and Music Research Group, Professor Fraser’s articles on Purcell and Handel have appeared in The London Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement. His books on postcolonial literature, on which he has published extensively, include the first ever monograph on the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah (Heinemann, 1980); the standard history of West African Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and a methodological study entitled Lifting the Sentence; A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction (Manchester University Press, 2000).
His works for the theatre include a translation and acting text of Domenico Cimarosa’s opera Il pittor parigino, and bio-dramas depicting the lives of Byron, Dr Samuel Johnson and the composer Carlo Gesualdo.
Robert Fraser did his undergraduate studies in English at the University of Sussex with David Daiches and Tony Nuttall. He wrote his doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London on ideas of tradition in English verse, while simultaneously studying Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition at Morley College, London under Melanie Daiken and James Iliff. Before coming to the Open University in 1999, Robert Fraser taught at the universities of Leeds and London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in English. He has also taught abroad: in West Africa, in Latin America and the Middle East. He has since written for a wide range of courses: Europe: Cultural Identities in a Contested Continent (AA300); Postcolonial Literatures in English: Readings and Interpretations (A430); Creative Writing (A215) and Words and Music (AA317). He has written about Blake and Anouilh for the MA module A815, and on Voltaire for A230. His most recent books, all products of the department’s ongoing project on the Colonial and Postcolonial History of the Book are the monograph Book History Through Postcolonial Eyes: Re-Writing the Script (Routledge, 2008) and two volumes of essays co-edited with Dr Mary Hammond of Southampton University, jointly entitled Books Without Borders (Palgrave, 2008). Professor Fraser was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in May, 2007.
Professor Fraser welcomes proposals from prospective Ph.D students in the broad areas of book history, anthropology and literature, and music and words.
Follow this link for a sampling of recent work »
Follow this link to view Professor Fraser’s inaugural lecture Biography and the morality of style.
See also Open Research Online for further details of Robert Fraser’s research publications.
Follow this link for Robert Fraser’s Wikipedia entry.
