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Education and Experience
Julia Jordan has a BA in Classics, and an MA in modern English literature (the âIssues in Modern Cultureâ MA on which she now teaches). She received her PhD from MyAV·¶ in 2008, and she has since taught various aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century literature at the Universities of Cambridge, Sussex and Cardiff. She was appointed to MyAV·¶ as a lecturerÌęin September 2013, and made Associate Professor in 2019.
Research Interests
My research has largely focused on chance, late modernism, the avant garde of the postwar period, and experimental writing more broadly. My first monograph, Chance and the Modern British Novel, was published in 2010, and since then I have published essays in journals including Textual Practice, Critique and Modern Language Review. My second monograph, Late Modernism and the Avant-GardeÌęBritish Novel: Oblique Strategies, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2020. Its subjectÌęis the generation of experimentalist writers in Britain who were influenced by Samuel Beckett and the continental writers of the nouveau roman, and grappling with the legacy of the modernist tradition. The monograph considers, among others, Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, B. S. Johnson, Nicholas Mosley, Ann Quin, Muriel Spark,ÌęAlexander Trocchi, and Denis Williams, and argues for this species of literature as particularly in thrall to the oblique andÌęthe accidental. The resurgence of the study of Johnson in particular has been instrumental in reinvigorating interest in this field: I am the co-editor of the anthology of his work Well Done God! The Uncollected B.S. Johnson (Picador, 2013), and the editor of a collection of essays on his work B. S. Johnson and Postwar Literature: Possibilities of the Avant Garde (Palgrave, 2014). I have also contributed chapters on the mid-century avant garde for the recent Cambridge Companion to post-â45 British Fiction (Cambridge, 2015), and Flower/Power: British Literature in Transition 1960â1980, edited by Kate McLoughlinÌę(Cambridge, 2017).
Other long-standing interests have included the writing of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Henry Green, Iris Murdoch and William Empson. Increasingly I have been working predominantly on poetry. I am interested in some aspects of theological and phenomenological literary criticism and theory, including the work of Jean-Luc Marion, and particularly in the light of the poetry of various writers from Hopkins and Empson to Peter Larkin and R. F. Langley. My new project, which has stemmed from these interests, will be about the notion of the post-secular pastoral, and how this might be deduced by thinking about the representation of trees in poetry. This project, or at least its first offshoot, will be entitled Arborealism.
I am or have recently been on the supervisory team for PhDs on Muriel Spark, the concept of the anexact in literature of the mid-twentieth century;Ìęthe intersection between experimental 1960s literature and art; avant-garde literature and the ludic; narrative form and experimentalism in Iris Murdoch, Brigid Brophy, and Sam Selvon; and the legacy of Pavlov, behaviourism and the twentieth-century novel. I welcome approaches from candidates wishing to research topics that align or overlap with any of my particular research interests.
Books
Late Modernism and the Avant-GardeÌęBritish Novel: Oblique StrategiesÌę(Oxford: Oxford University Press,Ìę2020)
Chance and the Modern British Novel: from Henry Green to Iris Murdoch (London: Continuum, 2010)
Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson eds. Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew, Julia Jordan (London: Picador, 2013)
B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde eds. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave, 2014)
Articles and Chapters in Books
âAutonomous Automata: Opacity and the Fugitive Character in the Modernist Novel and Afterâ, The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 96â113.
âIris Murdochâs âThingy Worldââ Modern Language Review, 107: 2 (April 2012), pp. 364â378.
ââFor recuperationâ: Form and the Aleatory in B.S. Johnsonâs The Unfortunatesâ, Textual Practice, 28: 5 (July, 2014), pp. 745-761.
âEvacuating B.S. Johnson and Samuel Beckett', in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde eds. Julia Jordan and Martin Ryle (London: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 136â152.
ââWhat Arises From This?â The Autostereogrammatical in Thomas Pynchonâs Mason & Dixonâ Critique, 56: 3 (May, 2015), pp. 270â283.
âLate Modernism and the Avant-Garde Renaissanceâ in The Cambridge Companion to Post-1945 British Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
'Error and the Aleatory in the 1960s Experimental Novel', in Flower/Power: British Literature in Transition 1960â1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
'Indeterminate Brooke-Rose'ÌęTextual Practice, 32: 2 (May,Ìę2018)