Laura Marcus was Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 2010 to her death in 2021. Her last book, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern, was published posthumously by Oxford University Press in 2023, having been prepared for the press by her husband William Outhwaite, and a number of friends and colleagues including Helen Small, Jo McDonagh and Isobel Armstrong.
To mark the publication of Rhythmical Subjects the UK journal Textual Practice has this month published a special issue on Laura’s work, entitled Laura Marcus: Rhythm. Cinema. Modernism. Psychoanalysis. Autobiography. Featuring contributions by several of Laura’s colleagues at Oxford, including Hannah Sullivan, Elleke Boehmer, Ankhi Mukherjee and Rebecca Beasley, the issue traces the contribution that Laura made to the disciplines and the university faculties in which she worked. In doing so, it shows how the work of a committed thinker and scholar such as Laura Marcus transforms the fields and the communities to which she belongs. As Helen Small writes, in an essay reflecting on the experience of editing Laura after her death, it is the gift of Laura’s book, as it is of all serious works of criticism, to ‘confront us with the limits of what we thought we knew’.
As well as exploring her contribution to literary criticism, the essays also celebrate Laura as a much loved colleague and friend who brightened the lives of those around her. As Peter Boxall writes in his introduction, ‘it is difficult to distinguish here between the public figure and the private person, between an acknowledgement of Laura’s contribution to critical thinking, and a memorial to her singular personhood’. In bringing together some of the scholars who worked most closely with her, the special issue seeks to honour both – the public figure, and the private person.
This special issue of the Textual Practice Journal is available to read on the publisher’s website: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/38/3
