Thoroughly Mischievous Person

Alan Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary Member of The Experimental Psychology Society, and a Member of the Society of Authors. Previous publications include Reading as a Perceptual Process (Elsevier, 2000) and The Psychology of Reading (Routledge, 2020) as well as several articles in the journal of the Arthur Ransome Society.

In A Thoroughly Mischievous Person, Alan Kennedy shows how Ransome\rquote s magical Swallows and Amazons novels are far more than stories of holiday adventure. Full of allusion to myth, fairy tale and the difficulties of his own family, and largely ignored by his biographers, they are in fact a hidden autobiography and set out to resolve the psychological tensions in his own conflicted life. Julian Lovelock, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and author of Swallows, Amazons and CootsAlan Kennedy presents a multi-layered psychological analysis of Ransome\rquote s literary genius. Experimental research is combined with psychoanalytic insights to show how individual characters, objects, and events capture the reader because they are pointers to deeper universal experiences. The book also offers a fascinating perspective on Ransome\rquote s complex personality, and on his use of fiction to reach a child that he could not reach in real life.Albrecht Inhoff, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Binghamton UniversitySharing lodgings at different times with the nature poet Edward Thomas and the Bolshevik agent Karl Radek, Arthur Ransome moved with apparent ease through many different worlds. Alan Kennedy brings both a lifetime\rquote s admiration and psychological interpretation to bear upon this fascinating and enigmatic character, exploring his life and character in the light of a psychoanalytic reading of his novels that opens up some of the darkest places of the man and the century. Stan Smith, Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University and author of Edward ThomasThis is a scholarly and absorbing book that offers a fascinating insight into Ransome's complex personality. Each chapter is accompanied by well-researched, extensive and informative footnotes as well as an additional reading list at the end of the book. Its perceptive psychological interpretation of this enigmatic character makes this a compelling read; the sexual symbolism that Kennedy reads into the stories, for example, is certainly thought-provoking. It will appeal to a wide audience interested in, among others, folklore, fairy tales, history, psychology, and literature. This is a book that makes you think and re-evaluate the benevolent, bald-headed man that Ransome presented to the world.B. C. Kennedy in Gramarye, Winter 2024, Issue 26.