Sarah Davison
Lecturer in English Literature, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Expertise Summary
BA (Oxon), MA (London), DPhil (Oxon) Areas of expertise: twentieth-century literature, modernism, James Joyce, modernist poetry, parody, intertextuality, genetic criticism.
Undergraduate Teaching: I contribute to the teaching of a wide range of literature modules at Nottingham, including Studying Literature and Twentieth-Century Literature. At level 3 I teach two specialist modules: Poetry in the Age of Modernism and James Joyce: Revolutions of the Word.
Postgraduate Teaching: I contribute to the teaching of Modernism: Inside and Outside and supervise dissertations on twentieth-century literature.
Research Summary
I am fascinated by modernism and its literatures. My doctoral thesis (2009) was the first study to show the defining role played by parody in the creation of literary modernism. Focusing particularly… read more
Recent Publications
DAVISON, S., 2011. Max Beerbohm's altered books Textual Cultures. 6(1), 48-75 DAVISON, S., 2011. For the Love of Molly. Review: Karen R. Lawrence, 'Who's Afraid of James Joyce?' (University of Florida Press, 2010); Michael Groden, 'Ulysses in Focus' (University Press of Florida, 2010). Times Literary Supplement (4 February), 7.
DAVISON, S., 2010. Review: Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), 'The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume 1. Britain and Ireland.' Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism. 8, 134-137.
Current Research
I am fascinated by modernism and its literatures. My doctoral thesis (2009) was the first study to show the defining role played by parody in the creation of literary modernism. Focusing particularly on Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, it examines how parody informed the modernists' experiments in style, form and satire, drawing on a wealth of primary material, including unpublished juvenilia, holograph drafts and comic material only previously treated anecdotally. I am working to expand the thesis into a monograph, Parody and Modernist Literature, which I hope will be published in the Oxford English Monographs series.
I am also in the final stages of writing Modernist Literatures: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism for Palgrave Macmillan. The Guide aims to provide a fresh, accessible, stimulating overview of the critical field imparting a lively sense of the diversity of the many poetries, fictions and theatres that participate in modernism. It is divided into two parts. The first explores how major currents in modernist thinking developed and the contemporary reception of the literatures that they shaped, introducing the theories, movements, -isms, shisms, traditions, individual talents and critical terminology that no reader can afford to ignore. The second provides a historical survey of the scholarship that now is essential for readers to master, from the classic, canon-defining accounts of modernist writing by New Critics right up to the cutting-edge methodologies, critical paradigms, discoveries and concerns that are reshaping the field today, furnishing readers with the knowledge and insight to evaluate different viewpoints, engage with them critically and make their own interventions in critical debates.
A major theoretical approach of my present research is genetic criticism: the comparative study of different stages in the production of texts. In February 2011 I was awarded British Academy funding for 'Intertextual Joyce', a two-year project investigating the genesis of the 'Oxen of the Sun' chapter of Ulysses.
I would be delighted to hear from students or researchers with an interest in modernism or genetic criticism.