Luke Young

Thesis Title: The Modern Essayist: Politics & Literature in Britain and America, 1940 to Now.

Supervisor name: (Previously) Dr David Russell; (Presently) Dr Nicholas Gaskill.

I argue that in the second half of the twentieth century two seemingly incompatible conceptions of political action within democratic liberalism emerged - à la Chantel Mouffe's Democratic Paradox - which found their primary literary articulation through the historical and formal tension within the essay form between closed polemic and open-ended ambivalence. In three chapters I examine a set of Anglo-American public intellectuals from the 1940s to the 1970s who made the clearest use of the essay as a complimentary form to the competing impulses within democratic liberalism between consensus and plurality. Chapter one brings together George Orwell and Lionel Trilling; chapter two, James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt; and chapter three, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion. I then conclude my thesis with an Afterword on Zadie Smith, who, I argue, is the primary contemporary figure to inherit this tradition, having repeatedly used her essay collections to stage and reflect upon this dialectic of democratic liberalism.

Current or Previously Taught Modules :
(Visiting Students Programme): George Orwell; Virginia Woolf; 20th and 21st Century Queer Writing.

Find me on Twitter (X) here.