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Research Summary
Current Status
PhD (full-time) - currently registered
Research Topic
Saying Sorry with Style: Apology, Selfhood, and Writing Regret in Late-Victorian Literature
Research Summary
My research examines the significance of apology and the apologetic in late-Victorian literature, focusing on interactions with literary style, queerness, and selfhood. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy ('OLP'), it explores how Victorian writers developed distinctive styles that both express and shield regret. While recent scholarship has examined nineteenth-century prose styles as cognitive frameworks for self-reflection, my work repositions apology as a central aesthetic practice. In doing so, it demonstrates how narratives of apology engage the formal capacities of Victorian prose to explore the affective dynamics of self-justification, reversal, and second thoughts.
I align apologetic writing with Victorian queer aestheticism, producing a literary style aimed at preserving the subjective autonomy of queer identities (Friedman, 2019). Building on recent work in literary studies on OLP, I frame apology as a distinctive form of language use - in Ludwig Wittgenstein's terms, 'a language game with its own particular rules' (Moi, 2017).
My research reframes the discourse around John Henry Newman, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James as productive attempts to cultivate a vocabulary of apology that affirms the possibilities of a queer self. It explores apologetic writing across a series of key primary texts in the late-nineteenth century: Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Pater's Gaston de Latour, Wilde's 'De Profundis', and James's 'Prefaces'.
Research Interests
My primary research interests are on the transmission of literary identity in the late-nineteenth century. I have previously examined queer transmission in verbal portraiture in the works of Pater, Wilde, and Vernon Lee. I am now interested in both the shielding and expression of non-normative desires in the late-nineteenth century. Critically, I am interested in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and psychoanalytic frameworks such as object relations psychoanalysis.
Research Supervisor/s
Dr Rebekah Scott (University of Nottingham)
Dr Ben Masters (University of Nottingham)
Professor Daniel Moore (University of Birmingham)
Primary Funding Source/s
Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Studentship Award 2025
Research Institutes, Centres and/or Research Clusters Memberships
Member of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)
Member of the British Association for Decadence Studies (BADS)
Member of the British Society of Aesthetics (BSA)
Member of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS)
Publications
Lawrence, Marcus, 'How, why and to what extent do Yeats's poems engage with a politics of abstraction, and to what effect?', in Innervate: Leading student work in English studies, University of Nottingham, 14 (2021-22) https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/documents/innervate/21-22/engl3101-marcus-lawrence.pdf
Conference Papers & Presentations
'The British appropriation of Flaubert: an identification with Flaubert in one's own image - Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Walter Pater, Henry James and Eleanor Marx-Aveling', English Showcase, May 2023.
Additional Information
QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) - Qualified English Secondary School Teacher.