University of Lincoln

Faculty Member, Media, Humanities & Technology

Lecturer in English

Thesis Title: Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the 21st Century British Novel

About

www.drcarolineedwards.com

I am Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. I'm currently co-organising 2 conferences for the publishers Gylphi:

Maggie Gee Conference at the University of St Andrews (with Dr Sarah Dillon), August 2012:
http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville at Birkbeck, University of London (with Tony Venezia), September 2012:
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/42866

I am interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British fiction, literary theory, utopian literature and theory, Marxist aesthetics (particularly Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson), contemporary women's writing, modernism, literature and political subjectivity, and science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives.

I finished my doctoral thesis in May 2010, which looks at representations of time in the fictions of contemporary British writers including David Mitchell, Jim Crace, Ali Smith, Jon McGregor, Marina Warner, Jeanette Winterson, John Burnside, Maggie Gee and Sam Taylor.

Through close textual analysis the study outlines the concept of metachronous times, or times in which multiple simultaneous pasts and futures are operative within the present as well as referring to positions outside of temporal representation, thus questioning the paradoxes of linear time. This conception of time allows me to interrogate the narrative functions being performed by “fictions of the Not Yet”: what philosophical questions they raise; what utopian strategies they employ; how their various aesthetic experimentations and thematic preoccupations weave between secular as well as religious models of time and utopia; and what their broader cultural and political implications might be.

I have published articles in Contemporary Literature and Textual Practice (see: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a915264371?waited=0; and http://cl.uwpress.org/content/vol51/issue2/) and have co-edited a special issue for the Palgrave Macmillan journal, Subjectivity (“Collective Subjects and Political Transformation," see http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/index.html). I am also a regular reviewer for the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies and have published and forthcoming reviews and interviews in Textual Practice, Radical Philosophy, Historical Materialism, Left Lion Magazine and the New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/04/novel-politics-afghanistan

In 2008, I co-edited Mortality, Dying and Death: Global Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Inter-Disciplinary Press:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ebooks/. In September 2008, I co-organised the AHRC-funded conference "New Radical Subjectivities: Re-thinking Agency for the 21st Century" where the invited speakers included Prof. Peter Hallward, Prof. Couze Venn, Prof. Simon Tormey and Dr. John Cromby.

In April 2011 I co-organised "Spaces of Alterity: Conceptualising Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Practices and Narratives" at the University of Nottingham, with guest speakers Dr. Alberto Toscano and China Miéville (http://spacesofalterity.org/).

In 2010-2011 I was Tutor in English Literature at the University of Surrey and lectured on "Contemporary Literatures in a Global Context," "Genres and Contemporary Writing" and "Theories of Reading" modules at Levels 1 and 2. I have also lectured on film, TV, literature and critical theory at the University of Nottingham's "Introduction to Postmodernism" undergraduate (Levels 1 and 2) module in the Department of Cultural Studies and the MA module "Social and Political Theories" in the Centre for Critical Theory.

Professional Website:
www.drcarolineedwards.com

Department Homepage:
http://lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/staff/3004.asp

Edited Journal:
www.alluvium-journal.org

Twitter:
@the_blochian (https://twitter.com/#!/the_blochian)

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