Modern and contemporary literature

Chronologically it begins with work on the classic writers of High Modernism, including Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Dorothy Richardson, and comes right up to date with the study of digital culture both as a proliferation of new cultural forms and reading experiences, and as a subject within contemporary literature and the arts.

The geographical and cultural range of work is reflected in our research on English and Irish fantasy fiction, early twentieth-century American magazines, reading cultures in Canada, African American literary and visual culture, Black British and British Asian fiction, and South African novels and poetry.

As this suggests, much of our work is interdisciplinary. In addition to visual culture, which stands alongside literary culture in our research from modernism to the contemporary, we explore the relationship between modern literature and several other disciplines and fields in our work, including the law, evolutionary biology and the history of science. 

Researchers

• Dr Amy Burge - Popular fiction and romance
• Dr Rona Cran - Twentieth century American literature
• Dr John Fagg - American art and literature
• Dr Rex Ferguson - Historical specificity of texts
• Professor Andrzej Gasiorek - Twentieth century British literature and Modernism
• Dr Richard Graham - Contemporary digital culture
• Dr Dave Gunning - Contemporary Anglophone literature and postcolonial studies
• Professor Alexandra Harris - British art and literature, especially in relation to landscape
• Dr Matt Hayler - Contemporary literature and digital cultures
• Dr Oliver Herford - British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James
• Dr Andrew Hodgson - English poetry and individualism
• Professor John Holmes - Scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts
• Professor Tom Lockwood - Early modern and into the Romantic periods
• Professor Deborah Longworth - Nineteenth and twentieth century women writers
• Dr Daniel Moore - Nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual culture
• Professor Peter Morey - 20th century, contemporary and postcolonial literary studies
• Dr Jimmy Packham - American Gothic literature and maritime writing
• Dr Rebecca Roach - Literature, media and book history
• Dr Asha Rogers - Modern and contemporary writing in English from across the postcolonial world
• Dr Philippa Semper - Modern fantasy literature
• Professor Max Saunders - Modern literature and culture
• Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge - Twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history
• Dr Rachel Sykes - The twenty-first century American novel
• Dr Nathan Waddell - Early twentieth-century and Modernist literature
• Dr Sara K Wood - American literature and culture

Major publications

• Cran, Rona, Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture (2014)
  
• Ellis, Stephen, British writers and the approach of World War II (2014)
• Gasiorek, Andrzej, A History of Modernist Literature (2015)
• James, David, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (2019)  
• Moore, Daniel, Insane Acquaintances: Visual Modernism and Public Taste in Britain, 1910-1951 (2020)
  
• Morey, Peter, Islamophobia and the Novel (2018)
• Roach, Rebecca, Literature and the Rise of the Interview (2019)
• Rogers, Asha, State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (2020)
• Saunders, Max, Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31 (2019)
• Stonebridge, Lyndsey, Placeless People: Wrights, Rights, and Refugees (2018)
  Winner, 2019 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize
• Sykes, Rachel, The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (2017)
• Waddell, Nathan, Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (2019) 

Projects

• Imagined Futures
• Arts of Place
• The art of identification (2015-2016)

Find out more

• Research in English
• Doctoral research
• Research seminars