Claire Chambers awarded prestigious library fellowship

As part of her innovative project, 'Muslim Representations of Britain, 1988 to the Present', Dr Chambers will investigate Salman Rushdie's unpublished novel, The Book of the Peer. She will trace areas of productive overlap between The Book of the Peer and Rushdie's well-known The Satanic Verses. Where Rushdie dismisses The Book of the Peer as 'more or less incomprehensible' in his memoir Joseph Anton, Claire will show how many of the ideas pertaining to religion from the controversial 1988 novel germinated in the much earlier manuscript. She will also argue that the stylistically virtuosic novel The Satanic Verses frequently homogenized Muslims, paying little attention to differences between Sunnis and Shias, and will try to find reasons in The Book of the Peer and the archive more broadly for this flattening out of difference.