I am a Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Leicester. I work on the history and theory of the anglophone novel from the 19th century to the present. I’m particularly interested in how novelists’ techniques for representing thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations have evolved over the history of the form. Other interests include affect theory and emotion history, the health humanities, and histories, theories, and practices of close reading. My research has appeared in edited collections and journals such as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Literature and Medicine.
My first book, Troubling Late Modernism: Ethics, Feeling, and the Novel Form (Oxford UP, 2022), examines how modernist techniques for representing characters’ thoughts, feelings, and desires have been perversely reinvented by writers of the postwar period. Chapters on Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and Eimear McBride show how these writers at once exploit and interrogate the potential for modernism’s signature techniques to place readers too close to the experiences of protagonists compelled by perverse or exploitative forms of desire. Whilst other historians of the novel have characterised late modernism’s formal innovations as ethically and politically edifying, Troubling Late Modernism highlights their more disquieting potential for lending sympathy and profundity to sentiments deemed inadmissible in our everyday lives. Troubling Late Modernism was a finalist for the MSA (Modernist Studies Association) First Book Prize and the University English Book Prize.
I am currently completing a monograph manuscript, Cardiac Realism: The Affective Life of the Modern Novel, about a tradition of British novelists who turn to the heart to grapple with one of the great philosophical challenges of the novel form: how to put the physicality of feeling into prose? The book draws on the history and theory of the novel, affect theory and emotion history, and the history of medicine and science.
Before joining Leicester in 2024, I held visiting and postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Bristol, Columbia, Sydney, Stanford, and Tokyo. I gained my PhD from the University of York (UK) in 2018, after studying at Leeds, UCL, and Trinity College Dublin.
Photo©Steve Forrest/Workers’ Photos
Doug Battersby 