Recent publications
Find out about some of our recent publications
- Mimicry and display in Victorian literary culture: nature, science and the nineteenth-century imagination (2020) - Will Abberley
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism - The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel As Artificial Life (2020) - Peter Boxall
In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.'The Prosthetic Imagination is at once a majestic work of literary history and a formidable work of conceptual criticism.' David James, University of Birmingham
'This is a dazzling study of the prosthetic imagination in prose fiction, the logic which does not refer to the world but produces it. Boxall's thesis entails an entire re-reading of the novel's history as well as the abandonment of realist criteria.' Isobel Armstrong, University of London
- Scherzos Benjysos (2020) - Keston Sutherland
Scherzos Benjyosos is a set of four poems, scherzos in prosimetrical blocks, a comical, wild, and delirious sifting through the carnage of the financial crash, the dreamscapes of capitalist infancy, histories of sadism and persecution, the fetish bars of canonical literature, and the psychoanalysis of grass. The book also includes “Sinking Feeling,” Sutherland’s long poem from 2017, described by J. H. Prynne as “breathtakingly lovely, and desperate, racked with desire to become truthful love.”
- Mother: a memoir (2020) - Nicholas Royle
Before the devastating ‘loss of her marbles’, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously, swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of literature and of wildlife that will form his character and his career.In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son—Royle’s younger brother—to cancer in his twenties.
At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and ‘mother nature’, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself.
'A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer’s skill and generosity of spirit.'—Hilary Mantel
- Kelptown (2020) - Carol Watts
"This is poetry at the edge of the land, but also at the edge of our horizon. Kelptown is Kemptown, so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities, lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore, knowing that the waters are rising, but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives, and shows us how we can learn to live, alongside fellow species, which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given ‘DeExtinction Poems’ and ‘Notes on a Burning World’. But is also a poetry that knows it must ‘make a home/ on friable shores, built from inundate truths’. These beautiful lines are from the book’s title sequence, where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: ‘How do I live, tenant among your long fronds’. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts’ imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade, through what can seem like the end times, these are poems that open us to new relations with the world." —David Herd - Helene Cixous - Dreamer, realist, analyst, writing (2020) - Nicholas Royle
This book provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date critical introduction to the writings of Hélène Cixous (1937-), focusing on key motifs, such as dreams, the supernatural, literature, psychoanalysis, creative writing, realism, sexual differences, laughter, secrets, the 'Mother unconscious', drawing, painting, life writing, telephones, non-human animals, telepathy and the 'art of cutting'. There are close readings of Shakespeare, Brontë, Shelley, Poe, Carroll, Freud, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and Derrida, for example, alongside in-depth explorations of her own writings, from Inside (1969) and 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) up to the present. Royle's book will be useful to students and academics coming to Cixous's work for the first time, but it will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary literature, creative writing, life writing, narrative theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, feminism, queer theory, ecology, drawing and painting. - Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry (2019) - Samuel Solomon
What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era? Exploring an often overlooked history of Marxist-Feminist poetics in post-war Britain – including such poets as Denise Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Nat Raha – this book confronts this central question to debates about the value of humanities education today.
Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism demonstrates how ideas of social reproduction have been central both to the forms of post-1945 British poetry and the educational institutions where poetry is overwhelmingly encountered and produced. Combining new archival research with close readings of key poets of the period, the book charts the interrelated crises both of poetry itself and literary education more widely. Paradoxically, the very marginalisation of poetry in contemporary culture serves to offer the form new opportunities as an agent of social transformation.
- When blue light falls (2018) - Carol Watts
As 'blue comes on' in these elegies, a unique genre emerges, a lyrical epic that speculates on a world imagined through the physics of blue light… With its charge of blue, the four parts of the poem move from speculation to threnody and even to prophecy as the earth's atmosphere that hosts light gradually takes on ecological terror. This terror penetrates to inner and to civic lives, to networks of finance and to myths of gender. This is a major philosophical poem of our generation. (Isobel Armstrong). - An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017) - Nicholas Royle
Nicholas Royle’s magnificent novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a poetic and moving investigation into our relationship to birds and to the environment. It is exquisitely inventive and very funny, juxtaposing the stuff of scandalous gossip with scathing reports of how the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 interlinked ‘Hides’. Beautifully illustrated by artist Natalia Gasson, these short texts — primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock’s) — give us a different view of the themes that fly out of the novel: the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself. Compelling, audacious and dazzling in its linguistic playfulness and formal invention, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischievous wit and wordplay, and post-modern (or ‘post-fiction’) sensibility, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel might be.
‘Nicholas Royle, in his novel ‘An English Guide to Birdwatching’ has achieved what no other British writer has yet managed to achieve: to write about birds, people, bankers, capitalism, and climate change all together and in a way that asks us not only to listen but also moves us to act upon what we hear’. Alex Lockwood
- Special Subcommittee (2017) - Samuel Solomon
On one level, Special Subcommittee is an experimental family history of Samuel Solomon’s communist, labour-organiser grandparents, told through the sterile language of redacted FBI files and transcripts of congressional hearings. Against these subcommittees of repression, he then invents an ardent and committed lyric of queer communist relation revolving around his chosen family: his friends, lovers, and political comrades. The combination is wild, radical, and subversive. - Whither Russia (2017) - Keston Sutherland
Contains terminal drafts of the poems Sinking Feeling and Instincts on Trump University plus scrupulously deviant literal paraphrases of poems by the dead individuals Verlaine, Goethe, Gautier, Tasso, Toulet, Heine and Hölderlin.
- Against value in the arts and education (2016) - Sam Ladkin, Robert McKay and Emile Bojesen
Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art’s defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people’s lives lived in an “audit culture”, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people’s work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the “value” they purportedly name and describe.
- The Value of the Novel (2015) - Peter Boxall
The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.
Read a review from The Guardian
‘The Value of the Novel is a triumph. Peter Boxall offers us a sweeping, stimulating revision of critical and literary history that looks forward to the novel's future even as it looks no less to its past.' Robert Caserio, Pennsylvania State University
'In The Value of the Novel … Boxall traverses a vast terrain, offering compelling close readings of more than a dozen novelists and connecting them with dozens more from around the world. His prose is lush and lyrical, his readings subtle and intellectually demanding. Sentence by sentence, both books are pleasure-reads for anyone who cares deeply about literary criticism.' Andrew Lanham, Notes and Queries
Alumni publications
A number of our alumni who were associated with the Centre have gone on to publish books.
- Naomi Booth
Naomi completed her PhD research in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex, where she researched the literary history of swooning. This inspired her first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking (2015), an experimental novella about passing out, which was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign 2017 and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella 2016. Her first novel, Sealed (2017), is a work of eco-horror, which was shortlisted for the Not the Booker Award 2018. Her second novel, Exit Management (2020), moves between contemporary Britain, and 1940s Budapest, and is described by the Guardian as a "timely and original dissection of class and desperation in Brexit London". Her short fiction has been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and anthologised in Best British Short Stories 2019. She has recently re-written the Yorkshire folktale of the boggart for the Audible Original and Virago short-story collection, Hag. Her first short story collection will be published by Dead Ink in 2022.
- Abi Curtis
Abi writes fiction, poetry and critical essays and is head of Creative Writing at York St John University. She completed her PhD research in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Sussex. She received a Somerset Maugham Award in 2013 and an Eric Gregory Award in 2004 for her two collections of poetry (UNEXPECTED WEATHER and THE GLASS DELUSION (both published by Salt)). Her poetry has also appeared in the London Review of Books as well as numerous other publications. She is particularly inspired by work which crosses disciplines, and in collaborations with visual artists, scientists, environmentalists and musicians. She has written on psychoanalysis, squids, frescoes, poltergeists and bees.
Her first novel WATER & GLASS was published by Cloud Lodge Books in November 2017.
- Laura Joyce
Laura is an author of crime fiction, and critical studies of crime and thrillers, with a specialism in domestic noir. She co-edited the landmark literary study of domestic noir, Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. Other books include The Museum of Atheism (Salt, 2012), Luminol Theory (Punctum 2017) and an experimental poetry collection The Luminol Reels (Calamari Press, 2014). In 2021 her new book The Ovidian Locus Terribilis in Contemporary Crime and Horror Drama (Bloomsbury, 2021) will be published. She has also worked as a freelance editor on thrillers, literary novels, and narrative nonfiction.
- Alex Lockwood
Alex is a creative writer of novels, memoir, essays and the author of other forms of professional writing such as video script, podcasts, journalism, organisational communications strategies, and commissioned reports.
As a theorist, he works in the fields of Critical Animal Studies, ecocriticism, cognitive aesthetics, and creaturely writing as part of a wider anti-speciesist exploration of language and creative production. His subject areas include plant-based food policy, veganism, hunting, activist praxis, environmental and animal protection, and narrative framing.
Alex's published work includes The Chernobyl Privileges (John Hunt, 2019) and The Pig in Thin Air (Lantern, 2016).