English Research Focus
English research strengths cover a wide range of literary studies, including textual criticism, Australian and international literary history, and issues surrounding both the theory and practice of literature. Although the interpretation and re-interpretation of literary works remains an important facet of sectional activity, contemporary theoretical debate has opened up questions about what literature is and how texts work, and has widened the scope of literary studies into areas formerly the preserve of linguistics, philosophy, sociology and politics. Particular areas of current focus include:
- Australian biography
- Scholarly editing
- Eighteenth-Century English literature
- Creative Writing
- Postcolonial studies
- Women’s writing
- Discourse analysis
- Poetry and poetics
- Australian Studies
- Literary Biography
- Christina Stead
- Romanticism
- American Renaissance Literature
- Antipodean Romantics
- Nineteenth and twentieth century literature in English
- Dickens
- Shakespeare
- Henry Williamson
- Children's literature
- Fairy tale
- Fantasy
- Musical theatre
- Domestic writing
- Plain English, jargon, slang, and register
- Corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and stylistics
- Professional Writing
- English for Special Purposes
- Tertiary writing and composition
- English curriculum and pedagogy in schools
- Grammatical theory and practice
- Versification: metre and rhythm, metrical theory, comparative metrics
- Stylistics of prose and poetry
- Poetry and poetics
- Translation of literary texts
- Discourse analysis
- Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers
- Contemporary poetry and poetics
- 20th century Australian literature
- Symbolist and Modernist studies
- Modernist avant-gardes
- Creative writing (poetry)
- Literary theory and postmodern literature
- Women’s poetry
- Feminist theory
- Cinema studies
- Literature and psychoanalysis
- Creative Writing and Narratology
- Postcolonial Literature
- Alternative philosophies and aesthetics in pre and postcolonial South Asian literatures in English
- World writing in English: the diaspora; translations; globalistaion;
- home and belonging; cross cultural interactions; identity issues; space and displacement; history, myth and metaphor; narratives of co-existence and multiculturalism
- Individual authors: Michael Ondaatje, V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, J M Coetzee, Jumpa Lahiri; Amitav Ghosh
- 19th century women's literature
- Identity and self-construction in Victorian England
- Memory and women's literature
- Women's letters
- Women's journals and travel literature
- Law and Literature
- Testimonial Narrative
- Feminist Literary Theory
- Autobiography and Trauma
- Crime Fiction
- Barbara Baynton
- Contemporary Australian Fiction
- Literary history (18th century European, and modern Australian)
- Literary biography (ditto)
- History of Ideas
- Textual theory and Editing
- Textual transmission
- West African literature
- Literary Theory
- Narrative studies: fiction and narratology
- The novel: British nineteenth century novel; Walter Scott and the representation of history in fiction; nationality and fiction (my own research is primarily in relation to the Scottish case); the novel and the visual arts; description and narration in fiction; the work of post-WWII experimental novelists
- Comparative literary studies: theories of adaptation, appropriation and intertextuality; literature and history; semiotics and literature; postmodernism and literature; dialogism and dialogue in literature
- Literature as a cultural phenomenon; the construction of canons, and the relationships between ideology and literature
- John Ruskin, as a theorist of art and signs and as a creator and user of texts