Professor Andrzej Gasiorek BA, PhD

Photograph of Professor Andrzej Gasiorek

Department of English Literature
Professor of Twentieth Century Literature

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)121 414 5693
Email: a.b.p.gasiorek@bham.ac.uk

Address: Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

My research concentrates mainly on twentieth-century British literature, with a particular focus on modernism. I’ve published widely in this area. Key publications include such monographs as Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2003), J. G. Ballard (2005), and, most recently, A History of Modernist Literature (2015), as well as a number of co-edited collections, among them T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (with Edward Comentale, 2006), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (with Dan Moore), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (with Peter Brooker, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 2010), The Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol. 4: The Reinvention of the British Novel 1880-1940 (with Patrick Parrinder, 2011), Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (with Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, 2011), and Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide (with Nathan Waddell, 2015).

Qualifications

BA in English Literature (Sussex University)
PhD in English Literature, McGill University

Biography

I began my career at the University of East Anglia, where I worked for three years. I have been at the University of Birmingham since 1993. I was Head of the Department of English Literature between 2013-16, Head of the School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies 2016-2019 and am now Head of College or Arts and Law.

Teaching

I have taught and convened undergraduate and postgraduate modules across the whole range of English literature, although the bulk of my teaching lies in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Modules taught include: Literature Foundation; Literary Theory; Independent Study and Dissertation Preparation; Literature and Change; 19th & 20thC Literature; Critical Theory; Texts and Contexts; Literature and Aesthetics; Critical Practice; Contemporary Fiction; Joseph Conrad; Conrad and Ford; Henry James; Hardy and Lawrence; Literary Modernism; Making it New; Literature and Politics in the 1930s; Modernist Fiction and Ethics.

Postgraduate supervision

I am interested in supervising topics on twentieth-century British literature, but especially in the area of modernism, with a particular focus on Wyndham Lewis.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

Andrzej Gasiorek is author of Postwar British Fiction, which concentrates on the various responses to the legacy of Modernism and to the challenges posed by Postmodernism. Since 1995 he has been working primarily on Modernist literature, although he has maintained an interest in contemporary writing, producing a book on JG Ballard. The writing and painting of Wyndham Lewis is an ongoing source of interest to him, and his book Wyndham Lewis and Modernism discusses Lewis’s complex contribution to (and later critique of) Modernism.

Dr Gasiorek's present principal interests coalesce around questions of history, tradition and ethics from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, including: the literary history of Modernism and Modernist philosophies of history; the politics of avant-gardism; the concept of Modernism and how it has been (and is continually being) theorised; and the emergence of Modernism and its intellectual roots in the nineteenth century. Recent work includes collaborations on large-scale projects around Modernism and the literary aesthetics and historiography of this period.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Gasiorek, A 2015, A History of Modernist Literature. Blackwell History of Literature, Wiley-Blackwell. <https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/A+History+of+Modernist+Literature-p-9781405177160>

Waddell, N & Gasiorek, A (eds) 2015, Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide. Edinburgh University Press.

Gasiorek, A & Parrinder, P (eds) 2011, The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. Oxford History of the Novel in English, Oxford University Press.

Gasiorek, A, Reeve-Tucker, A & Waddell, N (eds) 2011, Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity. Ashgate. <http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9375&edition_id=9665>

Article

Gasiorek, A & James, D 2012, '‘Introduction: Fiction since 2000: Postmillennial Commitments’', Contemporary Literature, no. 53.

Gasiorek, A 2012, 'Michael Chabon, Howard Jacobson, and Post-Holocaust Fiction', Contemporary Literature, no. 53, pp. 875-903.

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Gasiorek, A 2017, Art and its Others 3: Aesthetics as Politics. in V Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Modernism. Cambridge Histories - Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 442-456. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139540902

Gasiorek, A 2016, Lewis and the Critique of Modernism. in T Miller (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis. Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge University Press, pp. 19-31.

Gasiorek, A 2016, Words Without Reason: State Power and the Moral Life in Brave New World. in N Waddell & J Greenberg (eds), 'Brave New World': Contexts and Legacies. Palgrave Macmillan.

Gasiorek, A 2015, Ford and Politics. in A Chantler & R Hawkes (eds), An Introduction to Ford Madox Ford. Routledge. <https://www.routledge.com/An-Introduction-to-Ford-Madox-Ford/Chantler-Hawkes/p/book/9781472469083>

Gasiorek, A 2015, Lewis and Technology. in A Gasiorek & N Waddell (eds), Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 159-172. <https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-wyndham-lewis.html>

Chapter

Gasiorek, A 2012, Exiles: the transatlantic review (1924) and The Exile (1927-8). in P Brooker & A Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Vol. II: North America 1894-1960. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 697-717.

Gasiorek, A 2011, Inside and Outside the Whale. in A Gasiorek & P Parrinder (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 4:The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 4, Oxford University Press, pp. 571-587.

Gasiorek, A & Parrinder, P 2011, Introduction. in A Gasiorek & P Parrinder (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880-1940. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Oxford University Press, pp. xv-xxiii.

Gasiorek, A 2011, Modernism’s Persistence: E. M. Forster, Zadie Smith, and the Alchemy of Beauty. in D James (ed.), Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Contemporary Fiction . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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