Geoffrey Wall
CONTACT
- Tel 44 1904 433334
- Email gw2@york.ac.uk
- Fax 44 1904 433372
INTERESTS
Shakespeare, Milton, Napoleon, Flaubert, Freud; life-writing.
Biography, as I conceive of it, is a distinctive and comprehensive form of historical inquiry. It requires a combination of meticulous scholarship, intellectual versatility, imaginative sympathy and narrative skill. I work closely with primary texts, reading between the lines, looking for the characteristic themes, the favourite phrases, the unexpected silences, the odd repetitions, the elusive features that give away more than can be said. My guiding theme is the conflict between creative human agency and material circumstance, the play of freedom and necessity, the tensions of success and failure as they unfold across a lifetime. I look primarily to recent traditions of English literary biography, as represented in the work of Lytton Strachey, Richard Holmes and Peter Ackroyd. Yet my practice as biographer is influenced equally by a sustained engagement with the disciplines of history as represented in the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Natalie Zemon Davies. I situate my work at the convergence of micro-history (so-called) and biography.
For more on biography see On Biography.
TOPICS SUPERVISED
Georg Lukacs (1993)
Joyce & the Politics of Irish Nationalism (1993)
Theories of Myth (1999)
Rabelais and the National Language (1997)
Festive Culture in Elizabethan Drama (2004)
Sir Thomas Wyatt (2004)
Visions of Obscenity: Sade, Masoch, Bataille, Ballard (2004)
Northern England in Twentieth Century Writing
AREAS AVAILABLE
Shakespeare; Biography and life-writing; Flaubert; Freud and Psychoanalysis.
EDITORSHIPS
Joint Editor of The Cambridge Quarterly (1998- )
PUBLICATIONS
Gustave Flaubert. Three Tales. Translation by R.W. With an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books. Pp. 200 + 35. (2005)
Gustave Flaubert. Sentimental Education. Translation revised by Geoffrey Wall. With an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books. Pp. 380 + 35. (2004)
Geoffrey Wall. Flaubert: A Life. London: Faber & Faber. 413 pages. (2001)
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Modern Times: Selected Writings. Translated by Robin Buss. Edited with an introduction and additional translations by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books, pp. 51 + 365. (2000)
Gustave Flaubert, Selected Letters. Translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books, pp. 32 + 427. (1997)
Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas. Translated by Geoffrey Wall with a preface by Julian Barnes. London: Syrens, pp. 12 + 67. (1994)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. Translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall. London: Penguin Books, pp. 27 + 292. (1992)
Wall, G. "Flaubert's Voice". In Mapping the Self: Space, Identity, Discourse in British Autobiography. Edited by F. Regard. Saint-Etienne: Publications de l'Universite de Saint-Etienne. Pp. 385-398. (2003)
Wall, G. "Filming The Tempest". In The Opera and Shakespeare. Edited by H. Klein & C. Smith. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. pp. 335-40. (1994)
Wall, G. "Dracula in 1897". In Edwardian and Georgian Fiction 1880-1914. Edited by H. Bloom. New York: Chelsea House. pp. 109-28, (1990)
BBC Radio Four: From Trotsky to Respect: A History of the SWP. Prog 1
BBC Radio Four: From Trotsky to Respect: A History of the SWP. Prog 2