Julia Dallaway

Thesis title: The Essay as Non-Narrative Life-Writing: Woolf, Didion, Solnit

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Doctoral research: My research explores ways in which auto/biography can eschew the constraints of narrative form, thereby allowing a person's life to be depicted with more realistic complexity. I focus on the essay form (tracing it back to the French verb essayer, "to attempt") as a rejection of "definitive" biography, looking particularly at the life-writing essays of twentieth- and twenty-first century female writers: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Joan Didion (1934-2021), and Rebecca Solnit (1961-). My theoretical framework includes the work of philosopher Galen Strawson on 'Narrative' and 'non-Narrative' identities. 

Research interests: life-writing, narratology, essays, women's writing, modernism, literature and philosophy, mysticism