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David James

Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature, Faculty of Arts

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Expertise Summary

BA (Birmingham, 2002) MSt (Oxford, 2003) DPhil (Sussex, 2006) Areas of expertise: contemporary American, British and world Anglophone fiction; comparative modernisms; black British fiction, particularly the work of Andrea Levy and Caryl Phillips; cultural geography, modern regional fiction, and the politics of place in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.

Teaching Summary

My teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level cuts across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. I currently convene both the first-year undergraduate introductory survey module for… read more

Research Summary

My research has three main strands. The first of these concentrates on the history and theory of the postwar novel. Within this area I have published articles and chapters on writers as diverse as… read more

Selected Publications

  • JAMES, D., 2012. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., ed., 2011. The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2012. 'A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel'. Contemporary Literature. 53(4), (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2008. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception London and New York: Continuum.

My teaching at both undergraduate and postgraduate level cuts across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. I currently convene both the first-year undergraduate introductory survey module for the study of literature (from 1500 to the present), and the second-year period module 'The Twentieth Century: Forms in Transition'. I offer two specialist options each year for finalists: a module on the postwar novel, 'Modern British Fiction since 1950'; and one on twenty-first-century fiction, 'Post-Millennial (Re)formations'.

At MA level, my teaching focuses largely on modernist fiction and on late-twentieth-century literary culture. I have supervised PhD students working on topics across this literary-historical time span, and I would be interested in prospective doctoral projects on a range of formal and cultural questions either in modernism or in contemporary writing.

Current Research

My research has three main strands. The first of these concentrates on the history and theory of the postwar novel. Within this area I have published articles and chapters on writers as diverse as Martin Amis, Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Iain Sinclair, and Graham Swift. Currently, I'm working on two larger contributions to this field: with Andrzej Gasiorek, I'm co-editing a special issue of Contemporary Literature for Winter 2012. It brings together a group of eight international scholars in twenty-first-century fiction studies to examine the topic of 'Post-Millennial Commitments', and offers an extensive interview with Caryl Phillips. Additionally, I am co-editing a collection for Bloomsbury, reflecting my ongoing interests in black British writing, on Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2013).

The second strand of my work pursues the critical dialogues between contemporary writing and the New Modernist Studies. Two forthcoming books have emerged from this context. A collection of essays for which I am sole editor, The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2011), includes an Afterword by the novelist and poet Adam Thorpe, along with thirteen chapters by prominent US and UK literary historians who represent new directions in the comparative study of modernist, postmodern, and postcolonial literature. In addition, my next monograph charts the late twentieth-century reanimation of modernist aesthetics, and in so doing it provides a fresh critical vocabulary for articulating how an intimate engagement with form offers a lens through which to observe the political and ethical consequences of novelistic innovation. Modernist Futures will be published by Cambridge University Press in summer 2012. For more information see www.cambridge.org/9781107022478

My third research strand reflects a longstanding interest in cultural geography, as well as in the development of modern regional fiction in Britain and Ireland. That spatial poetics can advance our understanding of compositional and rhetorical transformations in the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novel is the argument behind my first monograph, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception (2008). This connection between landscape writing and reconfigurations of genre or mode is explored across several literary-historical periods in my co-edited collection, New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (2009).

My investment in the disciplinary vitality of contemporary fiction studies also has two key collaborative dimensions. I currently serve as a member of the Board of Editorial Consultants for Contemporary Literature. In addition, with Matthew Hart (Columbia University) and Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers University), I am founding co-editor of a new book series for Columbia University Press on contemporary writing: Literature Now. The aim of this series is to solicit rigorous, field-defining books that present methodologically inventive, textually attentive, and interdisciplinary interventions, mapping developments in late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone writing from both national and transnational perspectives. More information about our series can be found here: http://www.cup.columbia.edu/series/229

Future Research

Extending my work in modernist studies, with a particular emphasis on modernism's intersection with, and formal response to, other artistic media, I am currently co-editing with Nathan Waddell (University of Birmingham) a special issue of the Edinburgh University Press journal Modernist Cultures on the topic of 'Musicality and Modernist Form' (for publication in 2013). The issue aims to account for the way we might address literary invention through, and with, musicological terms, by showing how music itself operates both as a point of direct influence and as an analogical inscription for modernist writers. Taken together, our invited contributors broaden this scope of inquiry by moving from musical works alone to the relations between different textual and acoustic media. Approaching the music-modernism nexus comparatively, they chart the historical development of modernist literature's relation to the conditions of musical composition and reception.

Further collaborative work in modernist studies engages with the extent to which new methodological developments are shaping the priorities of the discipline. Born out of my interest in such transformations is a mid-term project that I am co-editing with Prof. Jim Hansen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Entitled Modernism and the Ethics of Close Reading, this collection brings together an internationally esteemed team of contributors to consider how the contested relations between aesthetic attentiveness and political interpretation mark a new watershed in the field. The books aims to show how those relations persist for scholars of twentieth-century literature, who are now renegotiating the dominant and emerging positions concerning the nature of form itself in conjunction with the ethical meanings and horizons of modernist literature.

  • JAMES, D., 2013. ‘“Seeing Beneath the Formlessness”: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism’. In: REEVE-TUCKER, A. and WADDELL, N., eds., Utopianism and Twentieth-Century Literary Cultures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2013. 'Decentring Englishness'. In: BOXALL, P. and CHEYETTE, B., eds., The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 7: British and Irish Fiction since 1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2013. 'Art Unseduced by Its Own Beauty: Humility and the Fate of Experiment'. In: NASH, A., WILSON, N. and PARRINDER, P., eds., New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D. and JAMES, D., 2013. 'Transnational Provincialism: Genre and Scale at Mid-Century'. In: ALEXANDER, N. and MORAN, J., eds., Regional Modernisms Edinburgh University Press. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2012. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2012. 'A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel'. Contemporary Literature. 53(4), (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2012. '"Style is Morality"? Aesthetics and Politics in the Amis Era'. Textual Practice. 26(1), 11-25
  • JAMES, D., 2012. 'Spaces and Places: Around the Globe'. In: CASERIO, R. and HAWES, C., eds., The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2012. 'John Burnside's Ecologies of Solace: Regional Environmentalism and the Consolations of Description'. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 58, (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., ed., 2011. The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2011. 'Dusklands'. In: MEHIGAN, T., ed., A Companion to the Work of J. M. Coetzee. Rochester, NY: Camden House/London: Boydell & Brewer.
  • JAMES, D., 2011. 'Late Ballard'. In: BAXTER, J. and WYMER, R., eds., J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • JAMES, D., 2011. '"Advancing Along the Inherited Path": Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, and the Idea of Being Traditionally New'. In: JAMES, D., ed., The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2011. 'Integrity after Metafiction'. Twentieth-Century Literature. 57(3), (In Press.)
  • JAMES, D., 2010. 'Hearing Hardy: Soundscapes and the Profitable Reader'. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 40(2), 131-155
  • JAMES, D., 2010. 'Modernist Narratives: Revisions and Re-readings'.. In: BROOKER, P., GASIOREK, A., LONGWORTH, D. and THACKER, A., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2009. 'Artifice and Absorption: The Modesty of The Remains of the Day'. In: MATTHEWS, S. and GROES, S., eds., Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives London and New York: Continuum.
  • JAMES, D and AND TEW, P., eds., 2009. New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press & Associated University Presses.
  • JAMES, D., 2009. 'Localizing Late Modernism: Interwar Regionalism and the Genesis of the "Micro Novel"'. Journal of Modern Literature. 32(4), 43-64
  • JAMES, D., 2008. 'By Thrifty Design: Ford's Bequest, Coetzee's Homage' International Ford Madox Ford Studies. 7, 243-265
  • JAMES, D., 2008. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception London and New York: Continuum.
  • JAMES, D., 2007. The new purism Textual Practice. 21(4), 687-714
  • JAMES, D., 2007. Shared impressions: Thomas Hardy, Henry James and the future of picturing Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 11(1), 31-58
  • JAMES, D., 2007. 'Ceative Reading and the Typography of Immersion in Albert Angelo'. In: TEW, P. and WHITE, G., eds., Re-Reading B. S. Johnson Palgrave.
  • JAMES, D., 2007. '"As he stalks his pillar to the dispossessed": Confessions of the Cryptographer'. In: BAVIDGE, J. and BOND R., eds., City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair Cambridge Scholars Press.
  • JAMES, D., 2006. Relocating mimesis: new horizons for the British regional novel JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 36(3), 420-445

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