Victoria Coulson
CONTACT
- Tel 44 1904 433348
- Email vc6@york.ac.uk
- Fax 44 1904 433372
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am currently completing my first book, Women, Realism, and Henry James. The book focuses on the textually-mediated relationships between Henry James and three of his most important female friends - novelists Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton, and Henry's sister Alice, career hysteric and author of a significant Diary - to argue that these writers drew together not only through their shared uneasiness towards dominant patterns of gender identity - and, on James's part, a long imaginative affiliation with women, but also in their affinity for a certain form of literary representation, which I term 'ambivalent realism'. My work combines biography, literary criticism, and theoretical inquiry to map out a new understanding of the links between subjectivity and representation in a transitional period of Anglo-American art and society. My work aims to draw breadth and illumination from an interdisciplinary approach to cultural production; Women, Realism, and Henry James includes discussion of the lives and work of figures from feminist activism, the stage, interior design, and portraiture. My theoretical affiliations are correspondingly diverse, ranging from structuralist narratology through psychoanalysis to queer theory and feminism.
Future projects reflect my interest in the functioning of realism across different cultural forms, and include work on Sargent and the quintessentially realist art of portraiture; on the narrative dimension of Victorian historicist architecture; and on textile metaphors in late-realist/early-modernist literature.
RESEARCH SUPERVISION
I would welcome applications from graduate students interested in James, Wharton, or Woolson; in the study of nineteenth-century narrative; in interdisciplinary work on nineteenth- or early twentieth-century cultural production. I also have special interests in Nabokov, Cather, and Djuna Barnes.
PUBLICATIONS
'Sticky Realism: Armchair Hermeneutics in Late James' won the Leon Edel Essay Prize and appeared in The Henry James Review 25 (2004).
'Teacups and Love Letters: Henry James and Constance Fenimore Woolson' will appear in the Spring 2005 issue of The Henry James Review.
An essay on Victorian Gothic architecture and nineteenth-century subjectivity (focusing on James, Austen and Charlotte Bronte) will appear in the forthcoming New Advances in Henry James from Palgrave Macmillan, ed. Peter Rawlings.