James T. Bowen

Provisional Thesis Title: The Rise and Fall of the Mid-Century Celebrity Novelist

Supervisor: Professor Marina Mackay

Doctoral Research: My thesis considers the processes and criteria by which mid-century authors fall in and out of critical and/or popular favour. Examining the reception histories of a range of authors, focusing primarily on C.P. Snow, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles and William Golding, I advance the contention that central to their rising and falling cultural prominence is their relationship to a conception of the ethical role of fiction. Each chapter offers a reading of the author as a case study of the possible roles that ethics might play in authorial reputation, acting variously as an imperative for literary production that might in some sense redeem seemingly lacking aesthetic merit, or might conversely be read as a naivete that might be more appropriately neglected in favour of formal or theoretical concerns. Ultimately, I argue that a closer and renewed attention to each author's conception of fictional ethics and its critical handling offers renewed insight into both the post-war literary marketplace and mid-century public culture more generally.

In addition to my doctoral research, I have recently completed the Department for Continuing Education's PGCert in Psychodynamic Counselling, with a view to gaining accreditation as a practicing Psychotherapeutic Counsellor. As such, I am also interested in exploring the interstices of reading and therapeutics, and the extent to which what we read shapes our subjectivity. I am also amongst the first cohort of Postgraduate Fellows at St Edward's School, where I offer tuition and mentoring in English at a range of educational levels.

I have a paper forthcoming in Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers from the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson University Press, 2024), entitled '"The Admirable Hugh": Force and Violence in Woolf's Ethics'. My work has also appeared in the The Modernist Review, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, the St. Catherine's Academic Review, and as part of a collaborative article in the Post45 cluster 'Reading with Algorithms'.

I also edit and produce the acclaimed literary podcast 'A Reading Life, a Writing Life' with author Sally Bayley, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Audible, or listen here.

You can find me on Twitter @J_T_Bowen, and on Bluesky @jtbowen.bsky.social. You can also find out more about me on my website.

Research Interests: Mid-Century Literature, Modernism and its Afterlives, the Author, the Novel, Textual Materiality, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapeutics, Cultural History, Narratology, Literature and Philosophy, the History of English Studies, Literary Sociology