Dr Tom Stennett
Research Fellow
Research
The literatures of colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking Africa; the relationship between the arts and politics in Portuguese-speaking Africa; modern and contemporary Portuguese literature; comparative literature; and, translation.
My doctoral dissertation was on the pennames of the neglected Portuguese painter and poet António Quadros (1933-1994), who publishd poetry and prose fiction in Mozambique, where he lived 1964-1984. I used Quadros's peculiar case — as a Portuguese writer publishing under Luso-Mozambican and Mozambican pennames — to consider the question of what it means to be an author in Mozambique through the themes of identity (who counts as Mozambican?), canonicity (to what literary tradition do works authored by complex cases such as Quadros belong?), representation (who is empowered to speak on behalf of the Mozambican 'people'?) and readership (what is the role of writers in contexts of high illiteracy, such as Mozambique?).
My post-doctoral project will consider the relationship between literature and party politics in colonial and post-independence Angola and Mozambique. Through an analysis of a selection of writer-politicians — authors who were actively engaged in some form of political activities — the study will interrogate the literary histories of Angola and Mozambique.
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
2024
- Stennett. (2024) Dissident Authorship in Mozambique The Case of António Quadros (1933-1994), Oxford University Press.
2022
- Stennett T. (2022) Dissident Authorship in Post-Colonial Mozambique and Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Cases Of António Quadros and J. M. Coetzee, Literary Connections Between South Africa and the Lusophone World, Lexington Books.
2019
- Stennett T. (2019) Drinking in the Dark, Imitating under Bright Lights: A Comparative Study of Herberto Helder's O Bebedor Nocturno and Robert Lowell's Imitations, Comparative Critical Studies, volume 16, no. 1, pages 57-79, DOI:10.3366/ccs.2019.0310. [PDF]
- Stennett. (2019) The Polyhedral Victim and the Patchwork Abuser: A Comparative Study of Names and Naming in Vladimir Nabokov's <em>Lolita</em> (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa's <em>Myra</em> (2008), Portuguese Studies, volume 35, no. 2, pages 228-228, DOI:10.5699/portstudies.35.2.0228. [PDF]
2017
- Tom Stennett. (2017) Writing on Behalf of Those Women ‘Que Não [?] Têm Escrita’: Gendered Boundaries inside and outside the Fiction of Mia Couto, Portuguese Studies, volume 33, no. 1, pages 85-85, DOI:10.5699/portstudies.33.1.0085. [PDF]
