Victoria Coulson

Profile

Biography

Victoria Coulson came to York from a Research Fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

She is President of the international Henry James Society (2021-22).

Her interests lie in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British literature, in particular narrative representation, and in the material culture of the period. Her first book Henry James, Women and Realism (Cambridge 2007) explores the relations between realist representation and feminine subjectivity in the lives and work of Henry and Alice James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Edith Wharton. Her new book Elizabeth Bowen’s Psychoanalytic Fiction (Edinburgh 2020) highlights the force and originality of Bowen’s thinking about development, sexuality and gender.

She is currently working on trans subjectivities in Henry James’s fiction.

Research

Overview

Victoria is a psychoanalytic feminist literary critic and theorist working on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and material culture. In addition to books on Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen, she has published essays and articles on Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Jane Austen, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the work of Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault.

Projects

Victoria is currently working on trans subjectivities in Henry James’s fiction, and on the British psychoanalytic theorists Wilfred Bion and Esther Bick.

Supervision

Victoria would welcome applications from graduate students interested in James, Wharton, Woolson, or Bowen; in the study of nineteenth-century narrative more broadly; in British, Anglo-Irish or American modernist fiction; in interdisciplinary work on nineteenth- or early twentieth-century cultural production (especially material culture); or in psychoanalytic theory. She also has special interests in Nabokov, Cather, and Djuna Barnes.