- 20th Century British Literature, Literature, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Marxism, Housing, and 18 more20th Century, Cold War and Culture, Cultural History, Geography, Social History, Urban Studies, Utopian Studies, Architecture, 19th Century British (Literature), Media Studies, Newspaper History, Russian History, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Suburban Studies, Paris, London Writing, Teaching English as a Second Language, and Black Studies Or African American Studiesedit
- I studied for my BA and MA in English Literature at University College London receiving those degrees in 2003 and 200... moreI studied for my BA and MA in English Literature at University College London receiving those degrees in 2003 and 2004. I then moved to Birkbeck and the London Consortium, where I wrote my PhD about literary and cinematic representations of mass housing in London and Paris, graduating in 2008. This research became the basis of my first book, Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris, published by Palgrave in 2009. I am now writing a book about the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution in Britain.
At various times I have taught English Literature (and its theoretical, historical and cultural contexts) at UCL, Goldsmiths, Central St Martins, Birkbeck , Camberwell College of Arts, and the Open University. I took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the English Department at Queen Mary in 2010. Around the same time I started in my current role as associate editor of Critical Quarterly, a journal of literary criticism, film, cultural studies and creative writing established in 1958 and published by Blackwell-Wiley. I am an active book reviewer and have published reviews in Textual Practice, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and Critical Quarterly.
I arrived at UEA in 2012, first as a Leverhulme Fellow and then, from September 2013, as a lecturer.edit
This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as... more
This History offers a new and comprehensive picture of 1930s British literature. The '30s have often been cast as a literary-historical anomaly, either as a 'low, dishonest decade', a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, or as a 'late modernist' afterthought to the intense period of artistic experimentation in the 1920s. By contrast, the contributors to this volume explore the contours of a 'long 1930s' by repositioning the decade and its characteristic concerns at the heart of twentieth-century literary history. This book expands the range of writers covered, moving beyond a narrow focus on towering canonical figures to draw in a more diverse cast of characters, in terms of race, gender, class, and forms of artistic expression. The book's four sections emphasize the decade's characteristic geographical and sexual identities; the new media landscapes and institutional settings its writers operated in; questions of commitment and autonomy; and British writing's international entanglements.
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Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research... more
Red Britain sets out a provocative rethinking of the cultural politics of mid-century Britain by drawing attention to the extent, diversity, and longevity of the cultural effects of the Russian Revolution. Drawing on new archival research and historical scholarship, this book explores the conceptual, discursive, and formal reverberations of the Bolshevik Revolution in British literature and culture. It provides new insight into canonical writers including Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Dorothy Richardson, H.G Wells, and Raymond Williams, as well bringing to attention a cast of less-studied writers, intellectuals, journalists, and visitors to the Soviet Union.
Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.
Red Britain shows that the cultural resonances of the Russian Revolution are more far-reaching and various than has previously been acknowledged. Each of the five chapters takes as its subject one particular problem or debate, and investigates the ways in which it was politicised as a result of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of the Soviet state. The chapters focus on the idea of the future; numbers and arithmetic; law and justice; debates around agriculture and landowning; and finally orality, literacy, and religion. In all of these spheres, Red Britain shows how the medievalist, romantic, oral, pastoral, anarchic, and ethical emphases of English socialism clashed with, and were sometimes overwritten by, futurist, utilitarian, literate, urban, statist, and economistic ideas associated with the Bolshevik Revolution.
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This piece responds to Jeanne-Marie Jackson's book, The African Novel of Ideas, as part of a roundtable in Safundi.
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This is an account of the author's time as a student of the London Consortium.
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Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory... more
Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.
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The novel of explicit political commitment is often seen as simplistic and formally naïve by left-leaning critics, who prefer the Jamesonian political unconscious. Yet political novels stage left-wing arguments in artful ways that not... more
The novel of explicit political commitment is often seen as simplistic and formally naïve by left-leaning critics, who prefer the Jamesonian political unconscious. Yet political novels stage left-wing arguments in artful ways that not only situate arguments against counter arguments, but also test their efficacy in the embodied social lifeworld of the text. This essay uses Chantal Mouffe’s work on agonism to frame readings of H. G. Wells’s Kipps, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, and Doris Lessing’s A Proper Marriage. It shows how monological left-wing chorus characters bring counter-hegemonic ideas into the texts, testing the limits of liberal discussion novels.
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This paper explores the phenomenon of collective speech (or speaking in unison) in the fiction of Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963), focussing on The Rebel Passion (1929), Proud Man (1934) and Swastika Night (1937) (the latter two novels... more
This paper explores the phenomenon of collective speech (or speaking in unison) in the fiction of Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963), focussing on The Rebel Passion (1929), Proud Man (1934) and Swastika Night (1937) (the latter two novels were initially published under the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’). Highlighting Burdekin’s abiding concern with religious rituals, it suggests that the political dimensions of Burdekin’s oeuvre can be profitably read in relation to a set of liturgical debates that go back to the English Reformation. The Book of Common Prayer, which features in some way in all three of these novels, proves a profitable site to focus questions about collective speech, its rituals seeming to model a kind of communal collectivity, but one that was imposed by political force. The negative connotations of collective speech are particularly evident in the Nazi liturgy at the heart of Swastika Night, which combines elements of the prayer book with features of the Nazi Thingspiele. Whereas Proud Man seemed to want to counter enforced rituals of collective belonging with a retooled ‘unselfish individualism’, both Swastika Night and The Rebel Passion seek to mobilise more positive forms of speaking in unison to counter dangerous conformity and authoritarianism. Burdekin even innovates a form of narration that can be referred to as ‘collective interior monologue’, as she explores the relationship between individual consciousness and collective belonging. The paper thus builds on the valuable scholarship of Elizabeth English, Daphne Patai, Glyn Salton-Cox, Adam Stock and Keith Williams, positioning Burdekin as an important and innovative novelist of ideas whose historical, religious and philosophical interests are unusually wide-ranging.
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This chapter explores the genre of the scientific romance and its relationship with scientific knowledge and with literary modernism. It does so by focusing on depictions of the moon by Mark Wicks, H. G. Wells, Garrett P. Serviss, Charles... more
This chapter explores the genre of the scientific romance and its relationship with scientific knowledge and with literary modernism. It does so by focusing on depictions of the moon by Mark Wicks, H. G. Wells, Garrett P. Serviss, Charles Hannan, and G. H. Ryan. These are situated within a broader context of literary and scientific thinking about the moon in order to interrogate the idea—put forward by Jean-Paul Sartre and Marjorie Nicholson—that increasing scientific knowledge of the moon tends to dispel its mythical and poetic power. It is instead argued that scientific knowledge and the literary imagination coexist and at times feed one another. Moreover, despite a tendency in conventional literary histories to position the scientific romance outside modernism, the chapter shows how the depiction of the moon in a modernist text—the 'Ithaca' episode of Joyce's Ulysses—reveals essential similarities with the scientific romances under discussion.
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Why did British writers, when they wrote about the Soviet Union, often deploy the imagery of numbers, arithmetic and mathematics? This paper scrutinises a number of such instances, including Orwell's famous use of the equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’... more
Why did British writers, when they wrote about the Soviet Union, often deploy the imagery of numbers, arithmetic and mathematics? This paper scrutinises a number of such instances, including Orwell's famous use of the equation ‘2 + 2 = 5’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Koestler's fascination with Euclid's proof of the infinitude of prime numbers in The Invisible Writing. These are put into relation with less celebrated works where questions of number or of mathematical reasoning are politicised by being applied to the Soviet Union. The paper situates these literary representations in relation to three key debates that intersected in interesting ways. Firstly, a debate about utilitarianism's attempt to quantify social goods and the Romantic rejection of that attempt; secondly, a debate about the philosophical foundations of mathematics (which involved Russell, Wittgenstein and Heidegger); and finally, a debate about the relation between mathematics and dialectical materialism, which involved key British and Soviet scientists and mathematicians and reflected on the position of science under Communism. Taking my cue from recent calls by Alain Badiou and Steven Connor for a rapprochement between the humanities and mathematics, I argue that this was a period in which numbers and arithmetic were profoundly politicised in literature.
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The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of Romantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its... more
The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of Romantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its production. In the decades following the Russian Revolution of 1917 – at a time when collectivised agriculture was being implemented on a previously unimaginable scale, with disastrous consequences – the case for such a model was made enthusiastically by British Stalinists such as George Bernard Shaw, Jean Beauchamp, Margaret Cole, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This fed into a wider shift in British society where responsibility for securing the food supply was increasingly seen as a function of the state rather than the market. During the inter-war decades the centre of gravity for British socialists’ thinking about food production shifted from the cottage economy to the collective farm. Yet there were those – like Chesterton, Belloc, Orwell and Muggeridge, as well as the emerging thinkers of the organic movement like Louise Howard and G. T. Wrench – who in various ways held on to the cottage economy ideal and the peasant smallholder as a bulwark against the vast, industrialised mega-farms of the Soviet Empire. They were often seen not as socialists but as cranks. This paper explores the debates around this issue and considers their continuing relevance to our own thinking about the ways food is produced.
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I wrote about 100 entries for this dictionary, ranging from short biographical sketches to in-depth thematic essays.
This is a review of "The 1930s: a decade of modern British fiction", edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber, and Elinor Taylor.