Churchill’s Novel: Savrola
The Friends of the Library Trinity College
Paul Stevens
Churchill’s Novel: Savrola
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
7:30 for 8 pm
Combination Room
RSVP by 4 March
416 · 978 · 2653
FOTL@trinity.utoronto.ca
Paul Stevens is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture in the University of Toronto Department of English. His area of specialty is Seventeenth-Century English literature, especially the works of John Milton. Former President of the Milton Society of America and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, his most recent book is Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, co-edited with David Lowenstein, which won the 2009 Irene Samuel Memorial Prize. His publications on Churchill include “Churchill’s Military Romanticism,” Queen’s Quarterly (2006) and Ex Libris (2006) and “Final Reflections: Edmund Spenser and the End of the British Empire,” in Empires of God (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Churchill’s first and only novel, Savrola, was published in 1899 when the future statesman was just twenty-five years old. The novel may not be great literature but it is a fascinating work which does much to illuminate Churchill’s mind at the beginning of his career. Most importantly, it does much to explain his complex relationship with his parents and the wellsprings of his ambition.