Raising the Dead: Writing Lives and Writing Wars in Britain, 1914-1940
Margaret Homans and Katie Trumpener
My project investigates the scope and contours of the life writing genre during and after the First World War in Britain. I am interested in the intersections between popular writing and high Modernist literary efforts in this era and the ways in which biographies and memoirs offered a response to the tolls of this devastating conflict and its aftermath. The biographical genre must contend with the relationship of individual narratives and more collective histories--against the backdrop of war, this relationship becomes particularly crucial and must be redefined. Chapters in my dissertation cover the work of amateur memorial biographers writing about fallen soldiers, Spiritualists writing the "afterlives" of the war dead, memoirists like Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain, and the New Biographical experiments of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. As life writers consider the text's ability to recover and rematerialize the dead, they negotiate its place alongside newer representational media. Making powerful statements about biography's past role in making history and in making war, they sound a call for the essential evolutions that will allow the genre to remain relevant and to help craft a modern era.
"Among the Bohemians: Counter-Culture from Shakespeare to Kerouac" (Instructor)
"The Victorian Novel" (Teaching Fellow/Section Leader)
Publications:
“Peculiar Dearness: Sentimental Commerce in Maria Edgeworth’s ‘The Bracelets.’” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 2012 (forthcoming).
“To the Looking-Glass: Poetic Self-Fashioning and Prefigured Afterlife in Keats’s Letters and Poems.” Under review at Studies in Romanticism, 2011.
Edition (archival research, transcription, compilation, and editing) of reviews of women writers in “Biographical and Imperial Magazine” (1789). Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 1. Ann R. Hawkins, Series Editor. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.
Edition (archival research, transcription, compilation, and editing) of reviews of women writers in “Biographical and Imperial Magazine” (1790). Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. Vol. 2. Ann R. Hawkins, Series Editor. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.
Conference Papers:
“Tactile, Visual, Textual: Pope, Beardsley, and the 1896 Edition of The Rape of the Lock.” Yale Working Group in Book History, March 2011.
“Medium and Message: The Specter of Modern Spiritualism in Britain.” Yale British Studies Colloquium, March 2011.
“Reporting the Home and the World: Victorian Homemade Magazines in the Yale Collection.” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) Conference, September 10-11, 2010 at Yale University.
“‘The Office’ at 100: P.G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City.” Yale 20/21 Colloquium Graduate Conference, May 2010.
“The Return of the Soldier: Britain’s Haunted Homefront 1916-1930,” Yale 20/21 Colloquium Panel on War Literature, November 2009.
Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Assistantship, Yale Center for British Art; Chauncey Brewster Tinker Fellowship, Yale University; Moody Fellowship, Yale University; Phi Beta Kappa; Golden Key National Honor Society; Chancellor's Scholarship, U.C. Berkeley; Department Award (English), U.C. Berkeley
Research Assistant in Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2009-2011 Student (Administrative) Assistant, Registrar’s Office, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 2006 Editor, LexisNexis Matthew Bender, San Francisco, CA, 2004-2005 Volunteer Archivist, Livermore-Amador Valley Historical Society, Pleasanton, CA, 2004-2005.