Professor Sue Jones

Professor of English Literature; Tutorial Fellow, St Hilda's College
susan.jones@ell.ox.ac.uk

I have recently completed a monograph, Literature, Modernism, and Dance for Oxford University Press. Two future research projects will come out of this work: one which extensively explores the reception of the Ballets Russes in Britain and its impact on British literary aesthetics in the later twentieth century; the second is an extended project on Samuel Beckett and choreography, which explores Beckett’s relationship to innovations in European modern dance and dramaturgy; third is a consideration of geometry and modernism, focussing on the influence of classical and neo-classical philosophies of space and movement on literature and dance in the twentieth century. I also continue to co-edit the Cambridge Edition of Joseph Conrad’s Chance (1914) with Allan Simmons (St Mary’s, London), Justin Tonra (Virginia), and John H. Stape (General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of Conrad), a project that should be completed by 2015.

Nineteenth-, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature; Twentieth-Century drama and dance.

St HIlda's College website

Publications

  • Dance, Modernism, and the Female Critic in the New Age, Rhythm, and the Outlook

    May 2019
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    Chapter
    |
    Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s-1920s The Modernist Period
    This collection highlights the contributions of women writers, editors and critics to periodical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
    Literary Criticism

  • Shakespeare, Modernism, and Dance

    January 2019
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    Chapter
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    The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance
    By focusing on three short versions of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, this chapter shows the intersection between Shakespearean tragedy and modernist dance aesthetics at a fundamental stage of modern dance's development and, as is...
    Music

  • Imagined Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

    February 2018
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    Chapter
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    The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment
    Music

  • Choreographic Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

    December 2017
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    Chapter
    <p>This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.</p>

  • Physical and Narrative Movement in Heart of Darkness

    September 2016
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    Chapter
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    Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Editions)
    Fiction
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