Professor Mary Bryden examines the Lawrence phenomenon
Monday, 14 March 2011
Professor Mary Bryden at a recent Lawrence conference
Since his death in 1935, the extraordinary career of T E Lawrence has continued to fascinate historians, writers, military strategists and the wider public. Known throughout the world (often controversially) as 'Lawrence of Arabia', he remains one of the most famous and enigmatic figures of the twentieth century.
Professor Mary Bryden of the University's Department of Modern Languages and European Studies has recently begun work on an AHRC-funded Fellowship to track the many facets of T E Lawrence that continue to prevail in culture today.
"I am exploring why and how a figure such as Lawrence not only continues to have meaning in a post-modern, post-colonial context, but also appears as a recurrent reference point in cultural debate and production;" said Professor Bryden.
"Examples of some of the things I am examining are: plays, bandes dessinées (Franco-Belgian comics), novels, musical affiliations (e.g. the New Zealand vocal artist 'Lawrence Arabia'). The figure of Lawrence has also played into current debates about models of masculinity and transvestism.
"Lawrence's most famous work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, retains its international status, and has been repeatedly translated into French, most recently in 2009. These translations have never before been evaluated in relation to one another, and yet they offer important light on the cross-cultural 'translatability' of the Lawrence phenomenon.
"As a French Studies scholar, I am in a good position to undertake this, in addition to looking at the under-researched area of Lawrence's influence on some key French intellectuals, including André Malraux and Gilles Deleuze;" said Professor Bryden.
Professor Bryden has consulted archive material from France, Britain and America during her research. For some of her work, she will be calling on Lawrence material in the publishers' archives of Special Collections at the University of Reading. It mainly concerns work Lawrence did other than The Seven Pillars of Wisdom - reader's reports and reviews - not as well known but of great importance to Lawrence scholars.
A lesser known connection to Reading is the fact that Lawrence lost his first draft of the monumental The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1919, while changing trains at Reading Station. He then had to rewrite the whole thing.