Dr Luke Young

Thesis Title: On Liberal Democracy and the Temperaments of the 20th Century Essay

Supervisors: Dr David Russell; Dr Nicholas Gaskill.

Examiners: Dr Peter Boxall; Dr Thomas Karshan.

Why do novelists write essays? My doctoral thesis took this seemingly innocuous question as its starting point to develop a broad ranging analysis of why a range of Anglo American literary intellectuals in the post-war period found themselves drawn to the essay form, alongside (and sometimes as an alternative to) other textual forms. Bringing together political theory and genre theory I draw on Chantal Mouffe's Democratic Paradox to argue that the paradoxical methodological impetuses of the essay form provided a productive form for negotiating the competing logics embedded within liberal democracy between the commitment to a set of stable, universal principles, and a commitment to democratic pluralism as sustaining ongoing critique. I shed light on the essays of George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Zadie Smith, as each of them wrestled with the challenge of thinking and writing in the paradoxical energies of post-war democratic liberalism. 

Teaching:

George Orwell
Virginia Woolf
20th and 21st Century Queer Writing
1910 - the Present
1830 - 1910 American Literature