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R.
H. Gapper Book Prize 2010 The Society also commends the three further works shortlisted for the prize: - Rosemary Chapman: Between Languages and Cultures. Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy (McGill-Queen's University Press) - Ruth Hemus: Dada's Women (Yale University Press) - Aedín Ní Loingsigh: Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature (Liverpool University Press) The award, which is for the best book published in 2009 by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, is made by the Society for French Studies together with Mr Richard Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust, on the recommendation of a Prize Jury appointed by the Society for French Studies. The Prize Jury for 2010 was composed as follows: Chair: Diana Holmes (University of Leeds) Adrian Armstrong (University of Manchester) Jennifer Birkett
(University of Birmingham) Noel Peacock (University of Glasgow) Eric Robertson (Royal Holloway, University of London). The R. H. Gapper Book Prize will be presented to Professor Butterfield at the next Society for French Studies annual conference, which takes place at Queen Mary, University of London, 4-6 July 2011. The Winning Book: The Familiar Enemy, Ardis Butterfield This is a study of the intricate ways in which English and French were interwoven through the Middle Ages, not only as languages and literary traditions, but also as 'national' cultures. Ardis Butterfield reconceptualizes early states of English and French, each through the prism that the other provides, as profoundly hybridized. In doing so she challenges the monolingualism of anglophone critical studies of the period, showing how it felt to live and write in a culture that was at least bilingual, and in which the relationship between 'nationality' and language was far from simple. Disputing the traditional narrative of a progressive shift towards vernacularity in England, stimulated essentially by Chaucer, Butterfield brings out the overlapping, inter-lingual sense of identity of both 'nations', and the role of language as a site of conflict and mockery. The book's chronological and cultural scope, and its intellectual ambitions, are exceptional. Butterfield mobilizes a profound and wide-ranging knowledge of the field across both English and French studies, drawing not only on literary texts but also on documents from fields such as education and commerce. These sources are considered from different theoretical perspectives, deriving in particular from Derrida's Monolinguisme de l'autre, to reveal a complex and overdetermined 'entanglement' of languages, kinship ties, and political relationships. Astute close readings illuminate a number of individual texts from the period, but the larger picture remains constantly in view: the intertextual and the international inform each other. The argument unfolds persuasively across chapters that have been organized to defamiliarize the subject-matter, producing unsettling juxtapositions and resisting unitary chronology and teleology. This is nevertheless an eminently readable study: expression is lucid and unobtrusively elegant, with occasional self-conscious passages that strikingly illuminate problematic issues. Butterfield builds on a view that has gained increasing currency in social and historical studies: that 'nationhood', as traditionally understood, is a blip between pre- and post-national epochs. The implications of this notion for medieval England and France are drawn out in ways that also address a wide range of contentious issues, extending far beyond the book's immediate subject-matter. In methodological terms, this work will be significant for research conducted outside the realm of English and French literary studies, for instance in the fields of language contact and political rhetoric. It is also certain to have a major influence on research into other pre-modern multilingual cultures, such as the southern Netherlands, and to resonate with treatments of culture in the 'post-national' twenty-first century. Most importantly, Butterfield offers a provocative perspective on Middle English, as effectively a variety of French. This redraws the map of two academic disciplines by revealing, on the one hand, that Middle English scholars must address the French dimension of their material; and on the other hand, that Middle French scholars must consider the fine-grained diversity of the language(s) and culture(s) on which they work. As a result, the book will stimulate many researchers in other fields to engage seriously with French Studies. No discipline could ask for more.
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