Liz Yuen-Yuk Wan

Thesis title: Literary Dreams as Narrative Strategies in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley Circle

Supervisor: Professor Nicholas Halmi

Research Interests: Dreams, Romanticism, Enlightenment, Gothicism, narratology, translation, comparative literature, etc.
 

Doctoral Research: My project, now complete, synthesises the philosophical contexts and narratological analyses of dreaming in my interpretation of the literature by William Godwin (1756–1836), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and Mary Shelley (1797–1851). Through reading seventeen of their works of fiction in the context of contemporaneous medico-philosophical treatises, I argue that the writers selectively incorporated mostly Enlightenment, especially rationalist and associationist, theories of dreaming into their work yet also creatively reenvisioned the nocturnal phenomena for their narrative purposes.

I am currently working on turning my thesis into a monograph.

Selected Publications

Book Chapters

[Forthcoming in 2027] “Seaside Suicides, Shipwrecks, and Spectrality: Gothic Shores in Six Novels by Mary Shelley.” Coasts and the Gothic: Literature, Littoral Cultures, and Haunted Shores, edited by Jimmy Packham, Emily Alder, Joan Passey, University of Wales Press.

“Haunted beyond Dreams: The Gothic and Enlightenment in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction.” In Gothic Dreams and Nightmares, edited by Carol Margaret Davison. Manchester UP, 2024.

“Strangeness at First Sight: The Alienating yet Appealing 20th Century Chinese Titles of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.” In East-West Dialogues: The Transferability of Concepts in the Humanities, edited by Christoph Bode, Michael O’Sullivan, Lukas Schepp, and Eli Park Sorensen. Peter Lang, 2020.

Book Reviews

“Redgrave’s Ghost.” Hong Kong Review of Books. 2021.

“Hong Kong Noir.” Hong Kong Review of Books. 2020.

“Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Loa Ho.” Hong Kong Review of Books. 2018.

“Preserving Local Documentary Heritage: Conversations with Special Library Managers and Archivists in Hong Kong.” Hong Kong Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 2018), The Chinese University Press, pp. 193-197.

“Waltzing with Words: Viki Holmes’s Girls’ Adventure Stories of Long Ago.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Issue 38: “Writing Hong Kong.” 2017.

Conference Reports

BARS 2024 ‘Romantic Making and Unmaking’ Conference Report, BARS Blog. 2024.

Selected Teaching Experience

Summary: Before coming to Oxford, I taught as a part-time lecturer at St. Francis University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Metropolitan University (HKMU), and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). I have since qualified as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and taught in areas such as Romanticism, 19C poetry, and Metaphysical poetry at different colleges at Oxford.

I am passionate about learning and teaching, and would embrace opportunities for teaching, research collaboration, and beyond. 

Selected Authors Taught

Romantics: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen

Victorians: Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy

Metaphysical poets: John Donne, George Herbert, Abraham Cowley, Andrew Marvell

Course Design and Lecturing Experience

University of Oxford Visiting Student Programmes Tutored (1:1)

Tutorial and Seminar Facilitation

For more information, or to contact me, please feel free to visit my personal website at https://lizyywan.wordpress.com/. 

Thank you for reading thus far, and all best wishes!