Name Alastair Fowler | Role Author | |
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Books Kinds of Literature, A history of English literature, How to Write, Literary Names: Personal, Triumphal Forms: Structural Similar People John Carey, C S Lewis, Margaret Drabble | ||
Alastair David Shaw Fowler CBE FBA (born 1930, Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish literary critic and editor, an authority on Edmund Spenser, Renaissance literature, genre theory, and numerology. Fowler was educated at the University of Edinburgh, M.A. (1952). He was subsequently awarded an M.A. (1955), D.Phil (1957) and D.Litt (1962) from Oxford. As a graduate student at Oxford, Fowler studied with C. S. Lewis, and later edited Lewis's Spenser's Images of Life.
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Fowler was junior research fellow at Queen's College, Oxford (1955–59). He also taught at Swansea (1959–61), and Brasenose College, Oxford (1962–71). He was Regius Professor of literature at the University of Edinburgh (1972–84) and also taught intermittently at universities in the United States, including Columbia (1964) and the University of Virginia (1969, 1979, 1985–98).
Fowler is known for his editorial work. His edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, part of the Longman poets series, has some of the most scholarly and detailed notes on the poem and is widely cited by Milton scholars. Writing in The Guardian, John Mullan called it "a monument of scholarship."
His book Kinds of Literature is a pioneering study in the field of genre scholarship.
Fowler has been critical of some recent trends in literary scholarship, including "new historicism." In 2005, he published an extremely critical review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, which was widely discussed.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to literature and education.
Fowler's papers are on deposit at the National Library of Scotland.