Contact
Biography
BA (St Anne's College, Oxford); MA (University College London); DPhil (St Anne's College, Oxford)
Teaching Summary
Undergraduate Teaching: Our first year core module, 'Studying Literature', introduces strategies for reading a diverse range of literary works from 1500 to the present day. It gives me the chance to… read more
Research Summary
I am fascinated by modernism and its literatures. My book, Modernist Parody: Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023), takes… read more
Selected Publications
DAVISON, S., 2023. Modernist Parody: Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford University Press.
DAVISON, S., 2014. Modernist Literatures: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan.
I have co-supervised five PhDs to successful completion to date and I would be delighted to hear from students who wish to undertake a PhD in modernist literature or early twentieth-century literary culture more broadly. My interests span a range of authors, themes and methodologies, including:
modernism, adaption, parody and comic writing, genetic criticism and textual criticism, the Oxford novel, space, place, regionality, and women's fiction
- Modernism and the avant-garde
- James Joyce
- Ezra Pound
- Virginia Woolf
- T. S. Eliot
- Max Beerbohm
- Little magazines
- Adaptation
- Parody, satire, and comic writing
- Genetic criticism
- Textual criticism
- The history of criticism
- The Oxford novel
- The campus novel
- Space, place, and regionality
Undergraduate Teaching: Our first year core module, 'Studying Literature', introduces strategies for reading a diverse range of literary works from 1500 to the present day. It gives me the chance to teach much-loved canonical texts alongside works by exciting new writers. I teach and convene more specialized modules at levels two and three, including 'Modern and Contemporary Literature', which goes all the way from E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910) to On Beauty (2005), Zadie Smith's witty, expansively multicultural re-write of Forster's masterpiece, and the James Joyce strand of 'Single Author Study', which gives our students a special opportunity to get to grips with Joyce's highly experimental and endlessly fascinating novel Ulysses (1922). I supervise undergraduate dissertations on a range of topics, including: modernism and modernity; gender and sexuality; adaptation, parody and comedy; literary representations of space and place.
Postgraduate Teaching: I contribute to several team-taught MA modules, including 'Modernism and the Avant Garde' (which I usually convene), 'Place, Region, Empire', and 'Textualities', and I supervise dissertations in these fields.
Widening Participation: I am committed to widening access to higher education. I went to a comprehensive school and I have been engaged in outreach and access work throughout my academic career. I was Director of Widening Participation and Outreach for the School of English for many years and I was also the academic lead who initiated the University's association with the Brilliant Club, a UK non-profit organization partnered with the Sutton Trust and Teach First that aims to widen access to university for students from under-represented groups.
Current Research
I am fascinated by modernism and its literatures. My book, Modernist Parody: Imitation, Origination, and Experimentation in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023), takes modernist studies in a new direction by contending that parody is central to the whole modernist project, and not just the extreme avant-garde antics of Dada. It tells the story of how the daring, experimental styles of modernism evolved, offering fresh interpretations of celebrated works and archival writings by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and others, to reveal how parody shaped the revolutionary critical and creative practices that were crucial to the genesis of truly modern art.
I am gathering material for a new monograph on the Oxford novel, which forms a genre of writing in its own right. Oxford Fictions will examine how the University has been mythologized from the nineteenth century to the present day, looking at a diverse body of literatures, including farce, fantasy, detective fiction, and Bildungsroman. It will set fictional accounts of the lives of students, tutors, and citizens in their historical and social context, reflecting on the impact of the numerous reform acts that changed the clerical and classical character of the University and (in 1920) finally enabled female scholars to take degrees. Examining fictionalized accounts of scholars of many stripes, from clerics and aspiring country parsons to dandified aesthetes, donnish fellows and their brilliant wives and daughters, pioneering women, aristocratic bon vivants, queer trailblazers, working-class writers, international visitors, and members of marginalized groups, Oxford Fictions will pose questions about inclusion, the value of higher education, and the 'idea of the University' that remain relevant for the academy today.
I am also the author of Modernist Literatures: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). This lively, accessible Guide provides an up-to-date overview of the critical concepts that are essential for understanding British, Irish and American modernist poetry, fiction and drama in their wider transnational context. Part I sets out how the modernists understood their experiment, introducing manifestos, movements, traditions and individual talents, taking particular note of the activities of the European avant-garde. Part II provides a historical overview of the successive fashions that have shaped modernist studies from New Criticism right up to the methodologies that are changing the discipline today. The Guide introduces classic interpretations of familiar texts alongside fresh approaches to more recently recovered materials, investigating modernist responses to new thinking on sex, gender, race, human psychology, philosophy, science, technology, new media, and globalization, furnishing readers with the knowledge and insight to make their own interventions in critical debates.
I would be delighted to hear from students or researchers with interests in modernism, adaption, parody and comic writing, genetic criticism and textual criticism, the Oxford novel, space, place, regionality, and women's fiction, and I welcome PhD applications in these fields.