James T. Bowen

Provisional Thesis Title: ‘The Readers are Missing’: Recovery and the Minor Novelist in Modernism and Beyond

Supervisor: Professor Marina Mackay

Doctoral Research: My thesis considers the processes and criteria by which primarily modernist and mid-century authors fall in and out of critical and/or popular favour. Examining the reception histories of a range of modernist authors and their successors, including Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, John Fowles, and Clarice Lispector, I advance the contention that processes of recovery, by which an author is somehow restored to prominence, rest on a set of value-judgments inherited from anglophone modernism's self-fashioned cultural peripherality. Ultimately, I suggest that more sustained attention to these recovered authors' contemporary readerships and reception, as opposed to the artificial minority often imposed by contemporary paradigms of recovery, might facilitate new perspectives on the cultural presence of the Author.

In addition to my doctoral research, I am also enrolled on the Department for Continuing Education's PGCert in Psychodynamic Counselling, with a view to gaining accreditation as a practicing Psychotherapeutic Counsellor. As such, I am also interested in exploring the interstices of reading and therapeutics, and the extent to which what we read shapes our subjectivity.

I have a paper forthcoming in Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2024), entitled '"The Admirable Hugh": Force and Violence in Woolf's Ethics'. My work has also appeared in the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, The St. Catherine's Academic Review, and is forthcoming as part of a collaborative article in the Post45 cluster 'Reading with Algorithms'.

I also edit and produce the acclaimed literary podcast 'A Reading Life, a Writing Life' with author Sally Bayley, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Audible, or listen here: https://readinglifewritinglife.podbean.com/

You can find me on Twitter @J_T_Bowen, and on Bluesky @jtbowen.bsky.social.

Research Interests: Modernism and its afterlives, the Author, the novel, textual materiality, psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutics, cultural history, narratology, literature and philosophy, the history of English Studies