Willy Maley

William Timothy Maley (born 2 December 1960, Glasgow) is one of Scotland’s foremost literary critics. Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the English Association (FEA), and founder, with the late Philip Hobsbaum, of Glasgow’s successful Creative Writing programme, a seedbed for the Scottish novel since 1995, Maley is a critic, editor, teacher and writer. Maley has published widely (over 500 publications) – on early modern English literature from Spenser to Milton, and on modern Scottish and Irish writing, from De Valera to Devolution, and James Joyce to Irvine Welsh.

Biography

Maley is the seventh of nine children, the first in his family to go to University – both parents left school at 14 and 15. Raised in a notorious quarter of the district of Possilpark known as ‘The Jungle’, Maley was brought up on welfare and class warfare. Maley’s father, James, a communist party member and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a former POW captured at Jarama in February, 1937, borrowed books weekly from Gilmorehill Book Exchange and other sources, and Maley grew up in council house where books were read rather than owned, and where there were no limits on what was read, from American Pulp to the collected works of Marx and Lenin, from Enid Blyton to Joseph Stalin, and the classics in-between.

Education

Maley left Possilpark Secondary in 1978 and worked for 3 years, for Strathclyde Regional Council Roads Department, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Glasgow City Libraries before gaining at night classes (St Augustine’s Secondary) the necessary qualifications to start Strathcyde University in 1981. He went there initially to study librarianship but failed the course, resigned from the libraries, and continued with his studies in English Literature and Politics. After suffering marks of 35% and predictions of failure from his peers, in July 1985 Maley graduated from Strathclyde with First Class Honours with Distinction, winning the Meston Prize for top degree result in academic year.

In October 1985, after a summer working at the British Film Institute in London, Maley went to Jesus College, Cambridge, to pursue a PhD entitled ‘Marx and Spenser: Elizabeth and the Problem of Imperial Power’. On being asked ‘What’s the problem?’ by an old cold warrior on his first day, Maley replied ‘Which Elizabeth?’. The thesis was later renamed 'Edmund Spenser and Cultural Identity in Early Modern Ireland'. Supervised by influential critic and broadcaster Lisa Jardine, Maley graduated in 1990, by which time he was back in Glasgow writing plays and looking for an academic job, which, aside from some part-time tutoring at Strathclyde, eluded him for 2 years, during which time, in addition to a period of unemployment, he did a range of jobs, including writer-in-residence at HMP Barlinnie Special Unit. In 1990 Maley, in addition to his PhD, completed a Diploma in Linguistics for the Teaching of English Language and Literature at the University of Strathclyde.

Career

Between 1989 and 1995 Maley had eight plays performed at Glasgow's Mayfest and at the Edinburgh Fringe, as well as the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the Lemon Tree in Aberdeen, the Magnum Centre in Irvine and most of Glasgow's main theatres, including The Arches, The Old Athenaeum, The Pavilion, and The Tron. Maley’s theatre credits include From The Calton to Catalonia (1990), a dramatized account of his father’s experiences as a POW during the Spanish Civil War, co-written with his brother, John Maley, No Mean Fighter (1992), a unique collaboration between students at the RSAMD and inmates at Barlinnie Special Unit, which won a Scotsman Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival, and The Lions of Lisbon (1992), the story of Celtic’s 1967 European Cup victory, co-written with Iain Auld, brother of Lisbon Lion Bertie Auld.

From 1992-94, Maley worked as a Lecturer at the University of London (at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary respectively). In 1994 he moved to Glasgow University, where he was founder in 1995, with Philip Hobsbaum, of the Creative Writing Master’s, a course that has since become one of the most successful of its kind, producing a host of published writers and prizewinners, including Anne Donovan, Rachel Seiffert and Louise Welsh. Maley was promoted to Reader in 1998, and to Professor in 1999. To the question of how he went from drawing income support in Possilpark in 1991 to Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow in eight years, Maley replied: ‘You mean, What took me so long? I was busy.’

Maley has been a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (1997), and the University of Sunderland (2006-) and was the first recipient of the Gerard Manley Hopkins Visiting Professorship at John Carroll University in Cleveland (1998).

Maley’s research interests range from the representation of national and colonial identities in early modern texts through to deconstruction and postcolonialism. His most important academic writings address the depiction of the history and formation of the British state in the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton.

Maley’s first published academic work, an essay entitled ‘Centralisation and Censorship’, appeared in 1986, and was reviewed in the TLS by Lord Annan, then Chairman of Committee on the Future of Broadcasting, and author of The Annan Report (1974-77). Annan said of Maley’s work: “But there is no doubt what William Malley [sic] ... want[s]. For Malley no institution in a capitalist society can function as a free agent. The BBC, ethnocentric, Oxbridge-dominated, phallocentric and reactionary, lives a lie by pretending to be free when the licence fee makes it subservient to Government ... But the sublime indifference to the quality of programmes displayed by ... Malley (who would replace the present public service by ‘local cultural centres of communication’) is breathtaking.”

Subsequent reviewers have been kinder and have managed to get Maley’s name right too. Lorna Hutson, reviewing Maley’s book Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997) in The Times Literary Supplement remarked: “Particularly innovative are Maley’s readings of the Shepheardes Calender as ‘colonial text’, through a combination of careful recontextualization and an ingenious reinterpretation of Spenser’s archaisms as a type of ‘Hiberno-English’ ... In Maley’s dazzling court-room drama, all the Spenserian ‘notes and queries, reviews and rejoinders, observations and commentaries tucked away in obscure corners’ are, with punning and parodic energy, ‘brought to book’”. Achsah Guibbory, reviewing Maley’s Nation, State, and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003), described the book as “provocative, passionately argued, sharply written, and immensely readable.”

Maley has travelled widely as an academic, giving papers at conferences and as invited lectures, from Aberdeen to Zagreb, from Oxford to Utrecht, and from Cork to York. He is a strong advocate of the work of Jacques Derrida and Bell Hooks, and has worked on Marxist criticism from Engels to Eagleton.

Since 1990, Maley has written for a variety of Scottish newspapers, including The Herald, The Sunday Herald, and The Scotsman. In 1998, Maley was selected as one of 60 Scottish ‘New Faces’, part of a ‘pick of the likely movers and shakers of the coming millennium’, in The Sunday Times. In 2003, Maley was presented with the ‘Lifting Up the World’ Award by Sri Chimnoi at a ceremony at Edinburgh University. During seasons 2003-4, and 2004-5, Maley was a columnist for the Celtic View, the official magazine of Celtic Football Club, which he has supported since childhood. Maley has also worked extensively – but not expensively – in radio, television and film since 1985, when he was credited as Assistant Production Accountant on Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.

Maley’s playful, punning style of writing has led to him being compared to Beckett and Joyce (Margaret Beckett and Yootha Joyce), and it’s been said of him that ‘he puts the pun into pungent’.

Maley’s poem ‘On My Father’s Refusal to Renew his Subscription to The Beijing Review’, first published in PN Review in 2006, was selected by Alan Spence and the Scottish Poetry Library as one of the Best Scottish Poems 2007.

Publications

Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 (1993) (co-edited with Brendan Bradshaw and Andrew Hadfield) A Spenser Chronology (1994) Postcolonial Criticism (1997) (co-edited with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton) Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997) A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997) (co-edited with Andrew Hadfield) Irish Studies and Postcolonial Theory, special issue of Irish Studies Review 7, 2 (1999) (co--editor, with Colin Graham) Kelman and Commitment, a special issue of the Edinburgh Review 108 (2001) (co-editor, with Ellen-Raïssa Jackson) Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003) British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002) (co-edited with David J. Baker) Shakespeare and Scotland (2004) (co-edited with Andrew Murphy) Class, a special issue of Drouth 18 (2005) (Guest Editor) 100 Best Scottish Books (2005) ((co-edited with Brian Donaldson) Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2006) (co-edited with Alex Benchimol)

Links

www.willymaley.com Glasgow University Staff Page