Nicholas RoyleEmeritus Professor (English)
Research
My research interests lie primarily in modern literature and literary theory, especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis; Shakespeare; the uncanny; ecocriticism; non-human animals; and creative writing.
I welcome PhD applicants with an interest in any of these areas. I have supervised many doctoral theses, a number of which have later been published as scholarly monographs. Supervised PhDs include:
Simon Stevenson, A Critical and Clinical Reading of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (2003)
Daniel Watt, The Future of the Fragment: Transformations of Writing in the Work of Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee and Jabès (2003)
Peter Jackson, The Legacies of Knut Hamsun: A Literary and Cultural Study (2004)
Pauline Morgan, Elizabeth Bowen: A World of Ghosts (2004)
Lois Wheller, The Enchantment of Laughter: Comic Effect in Fiction and Critical Discourse (2004)
Jonathan Tiplady, Derrida and the Problem of Literature (2004)
Sarah Dillon, A Critical History of the Palimpsest in Modern Literature and Theory (2005)
Jennifer Cooke, ‘But I Ain’t Dead’: Legacies of Plague from Defoe to Romero (2007)
Abigail Curtis, The Freud Effect: At the Limits of Psychoanalysis and Literature (2007)*
Susie Lingham, Imaging Emptiness: Reading the Unconscious from Nagarjuna to Derrida (2008)
Jennifer Huynh, ‘Meanwhile...’: A Study of Narrative Time and Simultaneity (2008)
Christopher Stokes, Coleridge and the Sublime: Language, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2008)
James Theodosius, The Sophistry of Anxiety: A Study of Innocence and Repetition in Søren Kierkegaard and Micheal O’Siadhail (2008)
Alicia Meseguer, Looking-Glass Analysis: Reading Alice through the Portmanteau and the Virtual (2008)
Gwilym Jones, Shakespeare’s Storms (2009)
Christoforos Diakoulakis, Jacques Derrida and the Necessity of Chance (2012)
Bethan Stevens, Lost Works of Art: A Critical and Creative Study of Reception and Restitution (2012)*
Chiara Alfano, Sounding Shakespeare: Acts of Reading in Cavell and Derrida (2012)
Wen-Shan Shieh, Literature in Masks: Katherine Mansfield, Eileen Chang and the Possibilities of Creative Writing (2013)*
Naomi Booth, Swoon: The Art of Sinking (2014)*
Kristian White, Undoing 'You': Blindness and Second Sight in the Second-Person Novel (2016)*
Naomi Wynter-Vincent, In the Penumbra of Wilfred Bion: Possibilities for Literary Criticism (2016)
Robin Shochat Bagon, The Vertigo of the Beast: Thinking Animals in Literature (2016)
Mariam Zia, Religious Orientations, Storytelling and the Uncanny: A Reading of the Adventures of Amir Hamza (2017)
Jemma Deer, Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World (2017)
Camilla Bostock, Between Letters: D.H. Lawrence, the Nonhuman and the ‘Life of Writing’ (2017)*
(* = Creative and Critical Writing PhD)
My own current research projects include a book about the work of Héléne Cixous; a study of the contemporary novel and narrative theory; and a book about my mother.