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Brown, Dr Catherine
Job Title: Departmental Lecturer in English Literature
College: St. Catherine's
Period/ Subject: 19th/20th/ 21st Century
Email address: catherine.brown@ell.ox.ac.uk
catherine.brown@stcatz.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Long prose of the Victorian and Modernist periods, English-Russian comparative literature, the theory of comparative literature and of narrative, formalism, reader response, reception history, literary representation of torture, D.H. Lawrence, George Eliot, Lev Tolstoi, the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean.
Teaching Areas:
Literature in English since 1800, including its European contexts.
Recent Publications:
The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (London: Legenda, 2011) is both critical and metacritical. At the metacritical level, it argues that comparison is inescapably part of reading of a work of literature, both in relation to itself, and to other works. At the critical level, it considers how the parallel tragic and comic plots of Daniel Deronda, Anna Karenina, and Women in Love invite and frustrate comparison. The two levels of the book’s argument are closely related: metacritical observations are developed in the novels’ own terms. Remarkably little has been written on the nature and role of comparison, strictly understood, in literary study. This book demonstrates and reflects upon the pleasures and dangers of comparative interpretation, and aims to alleviate long-standing anxieties surrounding the status and potential of comparative literature, by developing a clear understanding of the nature of comparison per se.
Review of Horae Amoris: The Collected Poems of Rosa Newmarch, ed. by John Holmes and Natasha Distiller (High Rivendale Press, 2010). Publication autumn 2011.
D.H. Lawrence Newsletter: Review of BBC4’s 2011 adaptation of Women in Love. No. 89, Spring/Summer 2011, 12-18.
The Mill on the Floss in the Nineteen-Seventies’. No. 42, 2011, 70-76.
The Facts on File Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Kenneth Womack and William Baker, 5 vols (New York: Facts on File, forthcoming 2012), Vol. 2, one article each on Sonnets 88-93.
Comparative Literature: ‘The Unconscious Good Life in Women in Love and Anna Karenina’. Vol. 63: 1 (Winter 2011), 25-46.
Modern Language Review: ‘Scapegoating, Double-Plotting, and the Justice of Anna Karenina’. 106: 1 (January 2011), 179-94.
The George Eliot/George Henry Lewes Journal: ‘Why does Daniel Deronda’s Mother Live in Russia?’. 58-59 (September 2010), 26-42
Essays in Criticism: ‘Modernism in our Time’, 3,000 word review of Roger Griffin’s Fascism and Modernism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 60, 189-196.
Footpath (a Russian journal of English literature) ‘Unreliable Narrators’ forthcoming Spring 2012. ‘Chapters: Why Authors Use Them and How To Read Them’, ‘A Note on Realism’. Publication Spring 2011. ‘War and Peace in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, ‘A Note on Narrators’. Spring 2010.
Essays in Criticism: ‘Daniel Deronda as Tragi-Comedy’. 59, 302-323
The Victorian Literary Handbook (New York and London: Continuum, 2008), short article on ‘War’.
Current work:
Fictions of Torture explores the relationship between physical torture and fiction in various senses of that word, in literature of the last century and a half. It investigates the two-way interaction between torture and its representation; imagination is shown as both participating in and challenging the infliction of pain and its representation. The book therefore intervenes simultaneously in two debates: ethical and political discussion concerning the justifiability of torture, and literary critical and philosophical discussion concerning the position of the body in language and literature. Pain is approached both politically, and as a phenomenon which is ambiguously paradigmatic of the body per se, and of the enigmatic relationship between body and mind.
Since 2001 there has been a sharp increase in the practice, debate concerning, and level of acceptability of the practice and representation of, torture by and to Americans and Britons. Over the last decade a hundred and nine books have been published in English concerning either torture in general, or American or British involvement in torture in particular; of these only three concern literature. Of these one concerns torture in Classical texts, one concerns Early Modern texts, and the third is a book of poetry. My book, concerning modern literature, would therefore fill a gap which currently exists in the consideration of fictional torture in the light of twenty-first century events and discourse. It is based on the assumptions that representations of torture may reinforce, subvert, or transform readers’ attitudes towards what is represented; victims may be reduced by depiction to literary convention, or else accorded agonized subjectivity; narratives may be aligned with the inflictors of pain or the afflicted; and that literary criticism assumes a peculiar ethical responsibility in distinguishing between them. It is hoped that this book will equip readers and viewers to respond self-consciously, critically, and sensitively, to fictional depictions of inflicted pain, and in this way will make a small intervention in what might but should not be called a ‘War on Torture’. Slavoj Žižek has argued that ‘the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to entertain the idea while retaining a pure conscience’, and an analogous argument might be applied to the discussion of torture in fiction. However, I would argue that the current trend towards the legitimization of torture in practice and representation requires an articulate response which does not just devise a strategy of resisting the readings invited by certain kinds of texts on the basis of abstract moral arguments, but derives strategies from certain other texts, which deal with the same subject in more complex and responsible ways.
- Co-editor with Elinor Shaffer of The Reception of George Eliot in Europe (London and New York: Continuum, forthcoming 2013), part of the open-ended Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe project.
- Member of the editorial board of Footpath (Russian journal of English literature). Travels annually to Perm State University in the Urals, to give a two-day colloquium on contemporary British fiction to Russian academic anglicists.
- Member of the advisory board of Literary Papers (Oxford-based, country-wide student literary journal).
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