Cultural Currents 1870-1930
Our research group has a wealth of expertise in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture, considering transitions and continuities between the 'Victorian' to the 'modern'. We have particular interests in the Gothic, sensation and Weird fiction, the fin-de-siècle and modernism.
We are an interdisciplinary research group engaged in exploring the literature and culture of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries – often understood as the ‘Victorian to Modernist’ period (although we aim to challenge those definitions and dichotomies). Our members work across the fields of literary and cultural criticism, textual editing, digital scholarship, and publishing history, with interdisciplinary links to visual art, politics, history, and gender and sexuality studies. In considering transitions from the Victorian to the modern, our research engages in archival exploration, textual editing, close literary analysis and critical/cultural theories to bring new discoveries and fresh perspectives to this fascinating period in literature. We have an active PGR community and we hold regular events.
Members are engaged in individual and collaborative research projects, which include:
- Poetry 1922: Beyond The Waste Land (Sarah Parker, Oliver Tearle, English)
- Editing the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (Barbara Cooke, English)
- Wrestling Resurgence project which aims to explore wrestling as an artistic practice through live wrestling shows (Claire Warden, Drama)
- Anne-Marie Beller, (2020) Collapsing the courtship plot: the challenge to mid-Victorian romance in New Woman short stories of the 1890s, in New Woman Short Stories of the 1890s’, Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 2.2: pp.28-40, ISSN: 2632-4253. DOI: 10.46911/RISV8270.
- Claire O’Callaghan (2020). ‘“Pronouns are problematic”: The trans* body and gender theory; or, revisiting the Neo-Victorian Wo/Man’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 13(1), pp.75-99, ISSN: 1757-9481.
- Barbara Cooke (2018). Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, 1922-1966 (Oxford: Bodleian Library).
- Aaron Eames (2020). ‘The Herald of the Helianthus: Oscar Wilde and Sunflower Symbolism’, The Wildean, 57 (July 2020), pp. 56-75.
- Nick Freeman (2020). Fighting Like Cats and Dogs: Decadence and Print Media. In Murray, A (ed) Decadence: A Literary History, Cambridge University Press, pp.87-101, ISBN: 9781108426299. DOI: 10.1017/9781108640527.
- Rachael Grew (2021). Black goats and broomsticks: Feminism and the figure of the witch in Leonor Fini's designs for Le Sabbat. In Rosen, AV and Kjellmer, V (ed) Scenography and Art History, Bloomsbury, pp.13-13, ISBN: 9781350204447.
- Sarah Parker, and Ana Parejo Vadillo, eds. (2019). Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, Ohio University Press, ISBN: 978-0-8214-2401-8.
- Isobel Sigley (2020). ‘It has touched us all: Commentary on the social implications of touch during the COVID-19 pandemic’, Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 2:1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100051
- Oliver Tearle (2019). The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem, Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN: 978-1350027015.
- Jo Turner (2021). ‘A Romance of Two Worlds (Corelli, Marie)’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing, ed. Lesa Scholl (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan). Available here.
- Wim Van-Mierlo (2020). Vision and revision in the manuscripts of William Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats. In Bloom, J and Rovera, C (ed) Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp.17-36, ISBN: 9783030502768. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-50277-5_2.
- Claire Warden (2020). “Queer music-hall sport”: all-in wrestling and modernist fakery, Modernism/Modernity, 27(1), pp.147-164, ISSN: 1071-6068. DOI: 10.1353/mod.2020.0006.
- Peter Yeandle (2019). “Jumboism Is Akin to Jingoism”: Race, Nation and Empire in the Elephant Craze of 1882. In Farr, SBM (ed) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History: Essays in Honour of John M. MacKenzie, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.47-74, ISBN: 9783030244583.
Poets in Vogue
Poets in Vogue is an exhibition focusing on women poets and fashion, co-curated by Sarah Parker (Loughborough University) and Sophie Oliver (University of Liverpool). Working with Gesa Werner, a costume-maker at the V&A, the exhibition will feature a series of creative installations contemplating the relationship between poetry, fashion, celebrity and self-image in the work of twentieth-century poets including Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks and Anne Sexton.