Neal Alexander
Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Expertise Summary
Areas of expertise: Twentieth-century and contemporary literature in Britain and Ireland; literary geography; critical and cultural theory.
Teaching Summary
I teach on a range of modules across undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes, with a particular emphasis upon modern and contemporary literature.
At Level 1 I teach on Academic Community and Studying Modern Literature; at Level 2 I contribute to Invention and Tradition and The Twentieth Century. At Level 3 I offer two option modules: (with Dr James Moran) Modern Irish Literature and Drama; and Modern Urban Fictions. The former examines a wide variety of texts by Irish authors - ranging from Yeats and Joyce to John Banville, Paul Muldoon, and Marina Carr - in their historical, social, and political contexts. The latter explores the representation of urban spaces and cultures in novels by James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Alasdair Gray, and Jon McGregor, amongst others.
At postgraduate level I contribute to Modernism and Literature in Britain since 1950 as well as a number of the core modules. On the Distance Learning MA in English Studies I teach on Approaches to Text and Literary Geographies.
At present I am involved in supervising seven research students involved in doctoral projects on: Radcliffe Hall and female masculinity; contemporary biographical fictions; poetry, gender, and translation; nature and environment in contemporary poetry; J.G. Ballard and Naturalism; 'difficulty' in modern poetry and poetics; Kazuo Ishiguro and ethics.
I was surprised and pleased to receive a Lord Dearing Award for teaching in 2011.
Research Summary
My current major project is a monograph, Literary geographies: Writing place since 1960, which will draw upon recent work in literary criticism, cultural geography, and critical theory to examine… read more
Selected Publications
ALEXANDER, N., 2010. Ciaran Carson: space, place, writing Liverpool University Press.
ALEXANDER, N, 2013. Where lives converge: Peter Riley and the poetics of place. In: ALEXANDER, N and COOPER, D, eds., Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Postwar Poetry Liverpool University Press. (In Press.)
ALEXANDER, N., 2008. Dialogues of Self and Soul: The Autobiographies of W.B. Yeats and R.S. Thomas almanac - a yearbook of welsh writing in english: critical essays. 12, 1-31
ALEXANDER, NEAL, 2012. Shore lines: Place and environment in Michael Longley and Robert Minhinnick. In: JULIKA GRIEM, URSULA KLUWICK and VIRGINIA RICHTER, eds., Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film, and Cultural Theory Ashgate. (In Press.)
Current Research
My current major project is a monograph, Literary geographies: Writing place since 1960, which will draw upon recent work in literary criticism, cultural geography, and critical theory to examine representations of place and landscape in contemporary writing. The idea is both to survey the range and complexity of the geographical imaginations that inform poetry, fiction, and prose non-fiction from Britain and Ireland, and to clarify the parameters of literary geography as a critical paradigm. Simultaneously, I am co-editing (with David Cooper) a volume of essays, Poetry & Geography: Space, and Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool UP, 2013), and contribute an essay on the work of Peter Riley. Several related articles will explore literary representations of littoral environments, urban landscapes, and archipelagic relations. These closely interconnected concerns with place and geography are adapted to the historical contexts and aesthetic paradigms of literary modernism in a book of essays on Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh UP, 2013) that I am co-editing with my colleague Jim Moran. Besides co-authoring a substantial introduction, I will contribute an essay on Basil Bunting's major late modernist poem, Briggflatts.
Past Research
I have longstanding research interests in the field of Irish Studies, particularly the literature and culture of Northern Ireland. My PhD thesis surveyed more than two centuries of literary representations of Belfast in prose, and I recently published Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool UP, 2010), the first monograph on the work of this acclaimed Irish writer. My book examines the full range of Carson's ouevre in poetry, prose, and translations, but focuses primarily upon his multi-layered representations of space, place, and identity. Favourable reviews have recently appeared in The Review of English Studies and Irish University Review.
Future Research
My developing interests in theories of everyday life and the relationships between literature and democracy have recently resulted in a long essay on the fiction of Jon McGregor, and I hope to extend this strand of my research in coming years. I am also planning a series of essays, perhaps a book, on figurations of the modern city in novels by James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Alasdair Gray, and J.G. Ballard, amongst others.