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• English & American Studies
• Research in English & American Studies
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Modernism Research Group

The English and American Studies Subject Area is home to a group of researchers working on literature and culture in the period between 1870 and 1940. The group includes Professor Laura Doan, Professor Janet Wolff, Professor Jeremy Tambling, Dr Howard Booth, Dr Kaye Mitchell, Dr Robert Spencer, Dr Daniela Caselli, Dr Monica Pearl, Dr Michael Sanders, and Dr Liam Harte have also worked on the period.

Current notions of modernism have gradually recognized the diverse artistic and cultural manifestations which characterize the period from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, focusing for instance on different media, competing political agendas, and internationalism. Here at Manchester the modernist research group produces research aimed at revising genealogical and historical assumptions, national points of view, and fashionable notions of marginality. The group shares a commitment to interrogating the ideological formation of modernist studies, canonicity, and periodization from a perspective located within English Studies but characterized by a strong focus on comparativism, critical theory, gender and postcolonial theory. To achieve this, the group makes use of its members' specific critical competences while encouraging research on gender, empire, and comparative approaches.

We welcome postgraduate students who are committed to research in the following areas:

• the ideological formation of modernist studies
• gender and modernity
• Sapphic modernity
• sexology or sexual science
• masculinity and sexuality
• cultural history of the first world war
• women and war 
• cultural theory and aesthetics
• tragedy
• comparative literature
• the North, England and Englishness
• 'low' and 'high' modernisms
• colonialism and modernism
• nationalist modernisms
• Marx and Marxism
• life-writing, confessions, identity
• filmic and photographic representation and self-representation
• life and death in modernism
• innocence and experience in modernism
• authors including Radclyffe Hall, Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Henry James, Claude McKay, D.H.Lawrence, Robert Byron, Norman Douglas, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno.

Research Resources

Research on modernism, modernity, and the formation of modernist studies is facilitated by research centres and institutes with a strong interest in the ideology and culture of the period: notably the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA), directed by Professor Janet Wolff , and the Cultural Theory Institute (CTI). The School also benefits from the AHRC Centre for Surrealism and Its Legacies . Daniela Caselli sits on the steering committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies http://www.bams.me.uk/ and the group works closely with BAMS.

Discipline-based research seminar series (the weekly English and American Studies Research Seminar Series), interdisciplinary (CIDRA), graduate seminars, and visiting speakers encourage discussion and presentation of research papers in the area. A list of the forthcoming EAS speakers is here.  A one-day symposium provisionally entitled Modernist Environments is scheduled for the early summer of 2010, to be organised by Howard Booth and Robert Spencer. Further details will be published as they become available.

 

Discipline-based research seminar series, interdisciplinary (CIDRA) graduate seminars and visiting speakers encourage discussion and presentation of research papers in the area.

In addition to its impressive collection of books and journals on modernist literary subjects, the John Rylands University Library houses a number of Special Collections which would support research in this field, including:

 

• The Carcanet Press Archive, which includes material by H.D., Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Edward Carpenter, T.E. Hulme, Kathleen Raine, Ford Madox Ford, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Charlotte Mew, Wallace Stevens.
• The Annie Horniman Papers, which chronicle the history of the Abbey and Gaiety Theatres.
• The Basil Dean Archive
• Papers of C.E. Montague
• Papers of Allan Monkhouse
• The Katharine Tynan Collection
• The Guardian Archive, which includes a complete hard-copy set of the Guardian newspaper from 1821 to 1991, the records of the newspaper as a business, and editorial correspondence and despatches from reporters. It also includes Charles Prestwich Scott's correspondence (1872-1929) with many of the leading political and cultural figures of the time, from Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George to Emmeline Pankhurst, W.B. Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw.
• The Walt Whitman Manuscript Collections.

Our MA Programme in Post-1900 Literature, Theories and Cultures offers modules taught by colleagues experts in the field of modernism and twentieth-century literature. Among our modules usually on offer are 'Key Issues in Twentieth-Century Literary and Critical Theory', 'Radicalism, Dissent, and the English Novel, 1890-1960', 'Modernist Children', 'Postcolonial Narratives'. In addition to modules on the first part of the twentieth century, the MA offers a choice of modules in the contemporary period. For a full list of 'Post-1900' modules available next year please go here.

If you would like to pursue postgraduate research in any of the above areas, or wish to discuss a doctoral research proposal on an alternative topic in the period, please feel free to get in touch with Daniela Caselli at daniela.caselli@manchester.ac.uk or Howard Booth at howard.booth@manchester.ac.uk.