Rocío Gómez Ruiz

Thesis working title: 'The Novelist as Moral Thinker: Ethical Inquiry and Literary Form in the Nineteenth Century'

Supervisors: Professor Sophie Ratcliffe and Professor Helen Small

Research interests: Literary ethics; English literature 1830-1900; Theory of the novel; Virtue ethics; Moral psychology; Literature and philosophy; Victorian Realism; Periodical studies; Victorian criticism.

Doctoral research: I'm studying how Victorian novelists explore and dramatize the good life at different stages of human experience, tracing a correspondence between the arc of a life and the structure of narrative itself — beginning, middle, and end. My thesis examines George Eliot in relation to youth, Anthony Trollope in relation to midlife, and Margaret Oliphant in relation to old age, before turning in a final chapter to the obituary and the challenge of writing the shape of a life after death.