Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)

Dr Bran Nicol

Reader in Contemporary and Modern Literature
Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature
bran.nicol@port.ac.uk

My research interests are in post-war British and American fiction, crime fiction and film, cultural studies, and critical and cultural theory, especially postmodernism and psychoanalysis. My work on fiction includes monographs on the novelists Iris Murdoch and DM Thomas, and a study of the major US and British writers to have been associated with postmodernism, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009). I’ve also become increasingly interested in ‘crime culture’, the way that crime in literature and cinema reflects and shapes cultural anxieties and desires. This is the subject of my book Stalking, which appeared in 2006, and led to me being shortlisted for the 2007 Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year award. It has been translated into Italian and Korean, and a Japanese edition will appear in 2011.

I am currently writing a selective cultural history of the private eye in cinema for Reaktion Books, and working on two new projects: one on the figure of the neighbour in modern culture, the other on post-war avant-garde British fiction. I am a member of the Committee for the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University, the AHRC Peer Review College, and am on the editorial boards for Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Labyrinth: The Literary Journal of Postmodernism, S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, and The Iris Murdoch Review. I have written articles for The Times Higher Education Supplement and American Sexualities Magazine (http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/mad_about_you) and appeared on radio programmes discussing stalking culture.

Publications

Authored Books

The Private Eye: Detectives in the Cinema. London: Reaktion Books (forthcoming, 2011).

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Stalking [FOCI series]. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. (Korean edition, 2009; Italian edition, 2009; Japanese edition, forthcoming, 2011)

Iris Murdoch: the Retrospective Fiction. Second edition (revised and with 3 new chapters) London: Palgrave, 2004.

D. M. Thomas [British Council: Writers and their Work Series]. Northcote House, 2003.

Edited Books

Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Literature, Media and Film. [Co-edited with Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty]. London: Continuum (forthcoming in 2010).

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader [edited with an introduction]. Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

Journal Articles

'Iris Murdoch and the Aesthetics of Masochism', Journal of Modern Literature, 29:2, Nov 2006, pp.148-65.

'Philosophy's Dangerous Pupil: Murdoch and Derrida', Modern Fiction Studies (Special Issue on Iris Murdoch), 47:3, Sept 2001, pp.580-601

'As If: Traversing the Fantasy in Zizek', Paragraph (Special Issue on Zizek), 24:2, July 2001, pp.140-55.

'Normality and Other Kinds of Madness: Zizek and the Traumatic Core of the Subject’, Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, March 2000, pp.7-20.

'Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia, and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation’, Literature and Psychology, 45, 1&2, 1999, pp.44-62.

'Anticipating Retrospection: The First-Person Retrospective Novel and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 26, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp187-208.

Book Chapters and Other Publications

'Poe's Urban Environment'. In Kevin J. Hayes, ed., *Poe in Context*, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming, 2012).

‘Reading Spark in the Age of Suspicion’. In David Herman, ed., Muriel Spark: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

'The Curse of the Bell : The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative'. In Anne Rowe, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. London : Palgrave, 2007, pp.100-11.

"The Memoir as Self-Destruction": Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis'. In Jo Gill, ed., Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. London & New York : Routledge, 2006, pp.100-114.

‘Patricia Highsmith’. In Lee Horsley and Charles Rzepka, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.

'Murdoch's Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel'. In Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., *Iris Murdoch and Morality*. London: Palgrave, 2010.

‘Iris Murdoch’. In Brian Shaffer, ed., Encyclopaedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

‘D. M. Thomas’. In Brian Shaffer, ed., Encyclopaedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

'Iris Murdoch'. In the Oxford Encyclopaedia of British Literature, vol.5. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

'Postmodernism’. In David Bradshaw and Kevin J. Dettmar, eds., A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, Oxford : Blackwell, 2006, pp.565-70.

‘Mad About You’ [on stalking culture], American Sexuality Magazine [online] (June 1st, 2007)

‘Truly, Madly Modern’ [on stalking culture], The Times Higher Eduction Supplement (November 2nd, 2006)