Sullivan, Dr Hannah

Job Title: CUF
College: New
Period/ Subject: 20th - 21st Century

Email address: hannah.sullivan@new.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My research falls into two main areas: British and American modernism; and the history of the book, the text, and textual thought. My first book, The Work of Revision (forthcoming 2013), asks how and why writers have revised their work over the last hundred or so years, and what aesthetic effects different patterns of rewriting or excising produce. Modernist writers, who worked in the early period of the typewriter, were inveterate revisers or, as Henry James puts it, passionate correctors. I study the changes they made on manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and printed books, both before and after publication, and focus especially on Henry James, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound, with shorter readings of more recent writers. Over time, a compositional practice that seemed initially perverse or wasteful has become identified with literary value and seriousness. How does this history affect the way that contemporary writers continue to produce and describe their work? How did the shift from manuscript to typescript to word processor and personal computer affect the process of rewriting?

Other interests include English poetry and the history of prosody; practices of editing and translation; genetic criticism; digital texts and tools; and biography and life writing. My undergraduate degree was in Classics, from Trinity College, Cambridge, and I would welcome graduate students with interests in the Classical tradition in English.

My next project will explore conservatism and liberalism as formal dispositions in English poetry and prose of the last hundred and fifty years. This began with a short article on T. S. Eliot, montage, and alternatives to progressive history. In the book, I have two main aims: to recuperate quite specific and delineated traditions of British political thought for the study of literature; and to examine the political and ideological meaning of twentieth-century styles, including free verse and the new formalism; minimalism and maximalism; and obscurantism and professional jargon. 

Teaching Areas:

Victorian and Modern literature; American literature; book history and textual scholarship.

Recent Publications:

'Autobiography and the Problem of Finish', Biography 34.2 (2011).

'T. S. Eliot and the Classics'. T. S. Eliot in Context. Ed. Jason Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

'The Next Time', 'Paris', and 'The Middle Years'. The Critical Companion to Henry James. Eds. Kendall Johnson and Eric Haralson. New York: Clearmark, 2009.

'Modernist Excision and Its Consequences'. The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 102.4 (2008): 501-19.

'"But we must learn to take literature seriously": T. S. Eliot and the little magazines of modernism, 1917-1920'. Critical Quarterly 46.2 (2004): 63-90.

Poetry published in magazines including Poetry Quarterly, The Houston Literary Review, Magma, The Rialto, Envoi, The Guardian Unlimited, Leviathan, Poetry Wales, Prop Magazine, P. N. Review, Stand, and Reactions 2005.

Other Information:

I received my first degree in Classics from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2000 and then spent a year as a Kennedy Scholar in the Comparative Literature Department at Harvard. After studying for a M.Res. in Cultural Studies at the London Consortium, I went back to Harvard in 2003 to begin a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. From 2008-2011, I was as an Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University in California, where I taught undergraduate courses on T. S. Eliot, the 1910s, British Modernism, and Book History, and graduate seminars on 20c Authorship, Textual Criticism, and Literary Periodization.