John Lennard

John Lennard (born 1964) is Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Jamaica, and a freelance academic writer and film music composer.

Lennard grew up in Bristol, England and was educated at Bristol Grammar School and New College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis, on the use of brackets in English literature, was published by the Clarendon Press as the monograph But I Digress, and called both "a delight-house of a book" and "the strangest book (I think) I have ever reviewed". He taught at the Open University, the University of London, and the University of Cambridge before taking up his present chair at UWI. He is also a member of the Global Virtual Faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the general editor of the Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series for Humanities-E-Books.

Beyond his unusual work on punctuation Lennard's major work has been in literary handbooks for students in the last years of school and first of college. The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (OUP, 1996, 2nd edition 2005) has now sold more than 25,000 copies and has an associated website. It was followed by The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays (co-written with Mary Luckhurst, Professor of Modern Drama at the University of York), trying to bridge the gap between text-based literary and more performative teaching.

Lennard's more recent involvement with work on genre fiction, particularly Crime Writing, Science fiction, and Children's literature, reflects a long history of 'unliterary' reading and interest in literature as a means of living as well as a subject of aesthetic and historical study. He has variously protested the application of class snobbery to literature, and But I Digress features parentheses by Elvis Costello and Robert B. Parker as well as chapters on Marvell, Coleridge, and T. S. Eliot. Both Handbooks were similarly eclectic in choosing examples, and his annotated edition of the award-winning Jamaican verse-novel View from Mount Diablo by Ralph Thompson considers both the crime novel and the Bildungsroman as models.

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