Senior Lecturer Dr William Rowlandson is publishing a new book on the impact of visionary Emanuel Swedenborg on writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Argentine short story writer Borges described Swedenborg as the most extraordinary man in recorded history. In Imaginal Landscapes – Reflections on the Mystical Visions of Jorge Luis Borges and Emanuel Swedenborg , William Rowlandson offers a brief but deep-reaching study of this often unknown appreciation
Imaginal Landscapes shows how the Swedish visionary’s influence has gone a long way to explain Borges’s preoccupations with parallel existences, the infinite, and the mystery of language.
The book cements William Rowlandson’s position as one of the UK’s leading scholars on Borges, as well as raising important questions about the criteria often used to assess the lives and works of thinks and writers labelled as mystics.
William Rowlandson, based in the Department of Hispanic Studies, is also the author of Borges, Swedenborg and Mysticism (Peter Lang, 2013) and has published widely on Latin American cultural and political history including the history of Guantánamo Bay and Cuba during the War on Terror.
Imaginal Landscapes will be launched by its publishers, The Swedenborg Society in London on 19 March. For more information, see the publishers’ website.