Olivia Sutherland
Thesis title: The Vatic Mode: Literary Allusion and Imagining the Future in the Contemporary Novel
Supervisor: Professor Peter Boxall
Research interests: modern and contemporary literature; the novel; temporality; futurity; problems of contemporaneity; allusion, intertextuality and citation; autofiction; film; critical theory.
Doctoral Research: My thesis examines how a group of contemporary novels depict the present and imagine the future, through a structure of literary allusion. This allusive method produces a vatic or ‘prophetic’ mode, in a contemporary period facing an aesthetic problem of self-articulation. I am intrigued by the particularities of allusive technique in contemporary fiction, and how the reworking of old texts in new contexts can be used to correct the collective amnesia of a seemingly depthless present. I deal primarily with two, apparently very distinct, kinds of novel: autofiction and epic, considering how genre inflects my questions of temporality and allusion. The key texts of my investigation include works by Ben Lerner, Ali Smith, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and Claire Louise Bennett.
Publications:
- ‘The novel ajar: literary allusion and the search for an open future in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19’, Textual Practice (2025)
- ‘Under the Sign of Cliché: A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse, A Lover’s Discourse…’, Post45 (forthcoming)
Teaching: I have supervised undergraduate dissertations on late-twentieth century Gothic fiction and New Journalism. I have taught classes and tutorials on Prelims Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910-present). I have devised and taught a module on Literature in English 1910–present day to visiting students at Mansfield College, and I was a graduate teaching assistant for Paper 6: Film Criticism. I am currently the primary supervisor for a visiting masters student undertaking a year abroad at Queen's College, who is working on Shirley Jackson, and I am also supervising a visiting student at Worcester College, who is undertaking an independent study on Hollywood Melodrama. I am open to teaching opportunities across a range of papers, especially in the period 1830-present.
