Born on July 18, 1937, Paul Delany is a literary biographer who has published George Gissing: A Life and a fascinating study of the poet who was once touted as the most attractive man in England, Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke. The latter is a follow-up to his overview of an era, The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke And The Ordeal Of Youth (The Free Love Press, 1987).

As an SFU English professor, Delany also edited Vancouver: Representing The Postmodern City (Arsenal Pulp, 1994), a collection of essays evaluating Vancouver's cultural and social life, and he co-edited The Digital Word: Text-Based Computing In The Humanities (MIT Press, 1993) and Hypermedia and Literary Studies (MIT Press, 1991) with George Landow.

According to publicity materials: "Rupert Brooke (b. 1887) died on April 23, 1915, two days before the start of the Battle of Gallipoli, and three weeks after his poem "The Soldier" was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday. Thus began the myth of a man whose poetry crystallizes the sentiments that drove so many to enlist and assured those who remained in England that their beloved sons had been absolved of their sins and made perfect by going to war. In Fatal Glamour, Paul Delany details the person behind the myth to show that Brooke was a conflicted, but magnetic figure. Strikingly beautiful and able to fascinate almost everyone who saw him - from Winston Churchill to Henry James - Brooke was sexually ambivalent and emotionally erratic. He had a series of turbulent affairs with women, but also a hidden gay life. He was attracted by the Fabian Society's socialist idealism and Neo-Pagan innocence, but could be by turns nasty, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic. Brooke's emotional troubles were acutely personal and also acutely typical of Edwardian young men formed by the public school system. Delany finds a thread of consistency in the character of someone who was so well able to move others, but so unable to know or to accept himself."

EDUCATION:

1947-1954
St. George's College
Weybridge, England
G.C.E. Advanced Level - English, French (Distinction), Latin

1954-1957
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
B. Comm. (Honours Economics - First Class)
Lt. Governor's Gold Medal
Beattie Memorial Gold Medal
Montreal Stock Exchange Prize in Economics and Finance

1957-1958
Stanford University
Stanford, California
A.M. (Economics)

1959-1965
University of California
Berkeley, California
M.A. (English)
Ph.D. (English)
Thesis title: English Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century

1977
School of Criticism and Theory
University of California, Irvine
Courses with Edward Said, Stanley Fish

CURRENT POSITION:

Professor, Department of English
Simon Fraser University

APPOINTMENTS:

1956
Assistant Economist
Bank of Canada, Ottawa, Research Department

1958-1959
Economist
International Labour Office, Geneva, Research Division

1964-1966
Instructor
Department of English
Columbia University, New York

1966-1970
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Columbia University, New York

1970-1977
Associate Professor
Department of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C.

1977-
Professor
Department of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C.

1985-1986
Exchange Professor
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario

1990-1991
University Research Professor
Simon Fraser University

1995-96
Visiting Fellow
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, U.K.

AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS:

Chamberlain Fellowship, Columbia University, 1967
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1973-1974
SSHRC Leave Fellowships, 1975-1976 and 1982-1983
University Research Professor, Simon Fraser University, 1990-91
Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1990-
Killam Research Fellowship, 1992, 1993
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada, 1993-
Listed in: Directory of American Scholars, Contemporary Authors, Who's Who in the World, Canadian Who's Who

BOOKS:

Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke (McGill-Queens 2014) $37.95 978-0-7735-4557-1 cloth 20 b&w photos

George Gissing. A Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. Pp. xiii, 444.

Bill Brandt: A Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Pp. 335.

Literature, Money and the Market from Trollope to Amis. London and New York, Palgrave, 2002. Pp. 235.

[Editor] Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City. Collection of essays by various authors, with an introduction by the editor. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1994. Pp. 296.

[Editor] George Gissing. In the Year of Jubilee. London: J.M. Dent (Everyman), 1994. Pp. xxv, 399.

[Co-editor with George Landow] The Digital Word: Text-based Computing in the Humanities [Anthology of essays by various authors]. Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 362.

[Co-editor with George Landow] Hypermedia and Literary Studies [Anthology of essays by various authors]. Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1991. Pp. 352. Paperback edition, MIT Press, 1993.

[Co-editor with Liu Xianzhi] D.H. Lawrence in China: Proceedings of the First China D.H. Lawrence Conference. Jinan: Tomorrow Press, 1991. [Includes a Preface by P.D. English contributions translated into Chinese].

The Neo-pagans. Paperback edition, revised, and with a new Preface. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. Pp. xxiv, 270.

The Neo-pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth. New York: The Free Press, 1987; London: Macmillan, 1987 [Under title: The Neo-pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle]. Pp. xviii, 270.

D.H.Lawrence's Nightmare: the Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979. pp. xviii, 420.

Sixteenth-Century English Poetry and Prose: A Selective Anthology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976. Pp. xi, 563. [Co-edited with Jeffrey Ford and R.W.Hanning].

British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. pp. x, 198.

[BCBW 2015] "Literary Criticism"