Dr Christopher Worth

Background

I am a Senior Lecturer in the English section of the School of ECPS and also Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies (School of LCL). My educational background was in English Literature and I continue to think of myself as a literary specialist, but in the years I have spent at Monash I have been privileged to work with colleagues who have encouraged me to broaden my interests in general and theoretical topics such as popular culture, poststructuralism, narrative studies and cultural theory, as well as giving me the opportunity to read and teach literary texts from a range of countries.

Research Interests

The areas in which I do research can be put in both general and more specific ways.

I am interested in many aspects of fiction writing, especially in relation to contemporary analyses of narrative theory and practice. While my own thesis and subsequent research has mainly been shaped around British nineteenth and twentieth century literature, particularly Walter Scott and the historical novel, a number of the theses I have successfully supervised to completion have been on novelists working outside Britain (e.g. Cormac McCarthy or Annie Ernaux) or on popular fiction (e.g., science fiction).

Increasingly my own research and supervisions have been motivated theoretically. Through my work in the Centre for CLCS I have become involved with issues to do with how ‘popular’ and ‘high’ cultures interact, with narrative’s role in culture, with the cultural effects of intertextuality and remediation, with the history of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and with literary semiotics. I have supervised a wide range of theses in which these issues have been prominent.

Currently I am completing a book on Walter Scott and the Edinburgh Theatre that has been my most scholarly (and long drawn out!) research project. This is a specific and rich example of the kinds of engagement between literature, society and culture that fascinate me. I am also writing a number of essays on narrative practices in ‘minor’ writers – one of these, on Ivy Compton-Burnett, has already been published. I have a continuing interest in the great nineteenth-century writer, John Ruskin – my most recent paper on his work was ‘Ruskin Renames Nature’, looking at his studies of plants in relation to Foucault’s conceptualisation of ‘epistemes’.

Selected Publications

• 'A Father and His Fate: Intertext and Gender', in Essays on Gender, Narrative and Performance in Honour of Marie Maclean, edited Brian Nelson, Anne Freadman and Philip Anderson. University of Delaware Press. Forthcoming.
  
• '"A Centre at the Edge": Early Teaching of Literature in Australia and New Zealand', in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, edited by Robert Crawford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. 207-224.
• 'Ivanhoe and the Making of Britain', Links & Letters 2 (1995), 63-76.
• 'Douglas Jerrold', Dictionary of British Humorists, edited by Steven Gale. New York: Garland, 1995.
• Literature and Opposition, co-edited with Pauline Nestor and Marko Pavlyshyn. Melbourne: Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, 1994.
• 'Scott, Story-Telling and Subversion: Dialogism in Woodstock', in Scott in Carnival, edited by J.H. Alexander and David Hewitt. Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1994. Pp. 380-93.
• Special Issue of Southern Review (November 1992), guest editor.
• '"A very nice Theatre at Edinbr.": Sir Walter Scott and Control of the Theatre Royal'. Theatre Research International 17:2 (1994), 1-12.
• 'Swift's Flying Island: Buttons and Bomb-Vessels'. Review of English Studies n.s. 42:167 (1991), 343-60.
• Discourse and Difference: Post-Structuralism, Feminism and the Moment of History , co-edited With Andrew Milner. Melbourne: Centre for General and Comparative Literature, Monash University, 1990.
• Postmodern Conditions, revised edition, co-edited with Andrew Milner and Philip Thomson. Oxford: Berg, 1990.