Oliver Randall (KCL) - 2022-23 Students

The Authors Cricket Club: A Literary and Cultural History of the Gatekeepers of Englishnessamid the Decline of Empire (1895-1968)

The Authors Cricket Club was founded by Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. Barrie as a statement ofEnglishness and camaraderie among writers living in London. Both were in fact Scottish, butuntidy reality was kept out of the pastoral, idyllic England that the club’s players wrote about andsought to recreate. The Authors CC became a potent symbol for its members, who included aremarkable array of important cultural figures in the club’s seven decades of existence. Itsimportance as a symbol of Englishness, and its cultural impact in inspiring writers to define thatEnglishness, has never before been studied.

Primary supervisor: Prof. Paul Readman, KCL
Secondary supervisor: Dr Jonathan Day, KCL