Dr John Attridge

Research Summary

My main research area is modernist literature and culture, British, French and American. I am currently finishing a book on literary impressionism and the rise of professional society in Britain, dealing principally with Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. I also work on changing attitudes to social trust around the turn of the twentieth century, and am researching a project on the idea of specialization in academic disciplines.

Teaching

My main teaching interests are in twentieth-century literature, the novel, and film. In the School of English, Media and Performing Arts, I have convened the courses "Jane Austen in Context" and "Modernism and Modernity", and currently convene "Modernism: Text and Screen."

Publications

Edited book

John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist, eds, Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception (Ashgate, in press).

Journal articles

"Two types of secret agency: Conrad, causation, and popular spy fiction", Texas Studies in Literature and Language. In press.

"The Lesson of the Master: Learning and Cognition in What Maisie Knew", Sydney Studies in English 37 (2011).

Download

“‘Human expertness’: Professionalism, Training, and the Prefaces to the New York Edition”, The Henry James Review 32, no. 1 (2011).

“‘The Yellow-Dog Thing’: Joseph Conrad, Verisimilitude, and Professionalism”, ELH 77, no. 2 (2010).

“Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology”, Modernism/modernity 15, no. 2 (2008).

“Detourism: Murray Bail's Photographic Fiction”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 3 (2004).

Chapters

"Episodic trust: self, society and sociology in A la recherche du temps perdu" in Attridge and Rosenquist, eds, Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception (Ashgate, in press).

"Introduction: modernism, trust and deception" in Incredible Modernism (in press).

"Ford and Conrad", in Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, eds, Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming).

“Eclecticism and its discontents: Les Ecrits nouveaux and La Revue européenne”, in Peter Brooker, Andrew Thacker, Sascha Bru, Christian Weikop, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 3: Europe, 1880-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

“Murray Bail” in John Ball, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century World Fiction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

John Attridge, “Liberalism and Modernism in the Edwardian Era: New Liberals at the English Review”, in Jason Harding, ed., Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).

“‘We will listen to none but specialists’: Ford, the rise of specialization, and the English Review” in Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore, eds., Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transitions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008).

“‘I Don't Read Novels ... I Know What’s in ‘em’: Impersonality, Impressionism and Responsibility in Parade’s End” in Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau, eds., Impersonality and Emotion in Twentieth-Century British Literature (Montpellier, France: Université Montpellier III, 2005).

Review essays

Review article of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume 1: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Katherine Mansfield Studies 1, no. 2 (2010).

“Paris, capital of the nineteenth-century novel?” Review essay of Peter Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Brigitte Munier, Quand Paris Etait un Roman: du mythe de Babylone au culte de la vitesse (Paris: Éditions de la différence, 2008). Modernism/modernity 16, no. 1 (2009).

Other publications

“Solid and Shipshape: Ford, Conrad and the ‘Idea of the Career,’” The Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 2009.

Other Information

Fellowships and Awards

Bruce Harkness Young Conrad Scholar Award 2010

Harry Ransom Center Fellow 2009-10