Directory of Research and Expertise

Chapters

The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature and Politics, ed. by Rachel Potter and Christos Hadjiyiannis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

For a long time, people had been schooled to think of modern literature's relationship to politics as indirect or obscure, and often to find the politics of literature deep within its unconsciously ideological structures and forms. But twentieth-century writers were directly involved in political parties and causes, and many viewed their writing as part of their activism. This Companion tell a story of the rich and diverse ways in which literature and politics over the twentieth century coincided, overlapped – and also clashed. Covering some of the century's most influential political ideas, moments, and movements, nineteen academic experts uncover new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and politics. Liberalism, communism, fascism, suffragism, pacifism, federalism, different nationalisms, civil rights, women's rights, sexual rights, Indigenous rights, environmentalism, neoliberalism: twentieth-century authors wrote in direct response to political movements, ideas, events, and campaigns.

Chapters

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, is both a novelist, and a cultural and literary historian. Her critical and creative work published in 2015 focuses on the Indian Ocean cultural arena, teasing out its entanglements with empire and other global webs. The novel The Shouting in the Dark (Sandstone Press, 2015) crafts a portrait of a lonely girlhood and looks at the suppression of women's voices through its narration of the inner life of a young woman in the 1970s, set against the political chaos of apartheid South Africa. Her cultural history, Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015), considers the English metropole through Indian intellectual eyes, exploring the rich textures of contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire through poetry and travel writing.

Interviewers Diya Gupta and Bárbara Gallego Larrarte are doctoral researchers at King's College London and the University of Oxford respectively. Their conversation with Elleke Boehmer at Shared Futures examined the points of contact between creative and critical modes of thinking and writing.

Journal articles

Kate McLoughlin’s recent JML article, ‘The Modernist Party as Pedagogy’, introduces a role-playing model, a simulated, imaginary “modernist party,” to teach modernist literature. This paper responds to McLoughlin’s “modernist party,” evaluates our experience teaching a variation of it, and considers the value of role-play for the teaching of modernism. We argue that role-play allows students to experience the risk-taking aspect of the party simulation in a way that is generative of critical and creative ideas that can later be used in essay writing. The paper concludes by engaging with broader critical conversations about creative pedagogy, and modernism and difficulty.