Julia Dallaway

Provisional thesis title: 'Tatters of Clearness': Imagery, Form, and Meaning-Making in Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiographical Essays

Supervisor: Professor Kate McLoughlin

Doctoral research: My research considers the literary forms that writers choose for the purpose of expressing lived experiences. Although (auto)biographical texts have traditionally presented lives in the form of a "life story" or "life narrative", research across the fields of philosophy (e.g. Galen Strawson), historiography (e.g. Hayden White), and life-writing studies (e.g. Hermione Lee) warns of how the pursuit of narrative coherence in life-writing tends to end up producing inauthentic and reductive representations. In light of these concerns, I present the literary essay (from the French verb essayer, "to attempt") as an alternative life-writing form that—being characteristically tentative, associative, and partial—might allow a person's experiences and memories to be depicted with more realistic complexity. In particular, my thesis pays attention to twentieth-century women writers who turn to the essay form for their autobiographical writings, including Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), and Joan Didion (1934-2021).

I have presented my research at national and international conferences, including the International Auto/Biography Association Europe Conference (University of Warsaw), the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Lamar University, Texas), the Oxford English Graduate Conference and the Modern and Contemporary Literature Graduate Forum (both Oxford's Faculty of English), and the Franks Society Talks (Worcester College, Oxford).

My paper on Woolf, entitled '"Floating Incidents": The Ethics of the Essay as a Life-Writing Form in "Sketch of the Past"', is forthcoming in Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2024). I also write book reviews, including for Critical Quarterly (forthcoming) and the Oxonian Review (which can be viewed here: https://oxonianreview.com/authors/julia-dallaway).

I have experience of teaching Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910-Present) and FHS Paper 6 (Writing Lives), and have supervised undergraduate dissertations on Woolf. I have also taught Introduction to Contemporary English Literature as part of the Visiting Student Programme at Worcester College. 

In 2021, I was on the judging panel for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

You can find me on Twitter @DallawayJulia.

Research interests: life-writing, the essay form, women's writing, narratology, modernism, feminist theory, literature and philosophy, literature and religion, mysticism, cultural history