Cultural Currents: Nineteenth to Twentieth Century
Our research group has a wealth of expertise in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture, considering transitions and continuities between the 'Victorian' to the 'modern'. We have particular interests in the Gothic, sensation and Weird fiction, the fin-de-siècle and modernism.
Cultural Currents is a research group specialising in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture and considering transitions and continuities between the 'Victorian' to the 'modern'.
We have particular expertise in:
- Victorian Sensation Fiction
- The Gothic
- Weird Fiction
- The Fin de Siècle and the 1890s
- Decadence and Aestheticism
- Edwardian Literature
- Modernism
Our members work across the fields of literary and cultural criticism, textual editing, digital scholarship, and publishing history, with interdisciplinary links to visual art, politics, history, and gender and sexuality studies.
In considering transitions from the Victorian to the modern, our research engages in archival exploration, textual editing, and close literary analysis to bring new discoveries and fresh perspectives to this fascinating period in literature. We have an active PGR community and we hold regular events.
Research Group co-leads: Dr Jade Elizabeth French and Dr Sarah Parker
Publications
We publish across the fields of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and culture. Some of our recent publications include:
Jade French has published a book entitled Modernist Poetics of Ageing: The Late Lives and Late Styles of Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and H.D. (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Nick Freeman has edited a book of gothic stories by Elizabeth Walter entitled Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories (Seren, 2024)
Anne-Marie Beller and Claire O’Callaghan have published a co-written a chapter on ‘“The Unclosed Coffin”: The Neo-Victorian Afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Neo-Victorianism (Palgrave, 2024).
Clare Hutton has published a chapter on ‘Finding Miss Weaver: James Joyce and the Patron of Ulysses’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2000 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
Recent events
Our recent events have included:
May 2025: Symposium on Periodisation, Generations and the Gaps Between
Organised by Dr Jade Elizabeth French and Dr Sarah Parker, this symposium examined how periodisation, ageing and generational thinking shape our understanding of literary history.
Invited speakers including Professor David Amigoni (Keele), Dr Fatima Borrman (KU Leuven), Dr Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway), and Professor Helen Small (Oxford) addressed how categorising individuals by period or movement shapes perceptions of their relevance, timeliness, and value, and how biases like ageism play a role.
The symposium also considered how different genres, forms, and archives reveal the complexities of literary generations and explore the impact of periodisation on research and teaching practices.
Our other recent research events include:
- May 2025: Melissa Bradshaw (Loyola University, Chicago), ‘“Think of me not as a hernia”: Tracing the Medicalized Subject in the Amy Lowell Letters Project’
- February 2025: Alice Staveley (Stanford), ‘Taking Woolf’s Measure: Experiments in Data Visualizing Virginia Woolf’s Archives, from Bookmaking to Bookselling’
- February 2024: Sarah Parker (Loughborough University), book launch of Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024)