Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)
Dr Christopher Pittard
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
christopher.pittard@port.ac.uk
I joined the University of Portsmouth in 2009, having held previous teaching positions at Newcastle University and the University of Exeter. My main research focus is on the popular culture of the nineteenth century, especially the emergence of popular genres in the Victorian fin de siecle and detective fiction in particular. My forthcoming monograph, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, considers how such fictions (and the periodicals in which they appeared) engaged with ideas of material and social purity, ranging from Sherlock Holmes cleaning the face of criminality in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” to the moral policing carried out by the Social Purity movements and late Victorian antivivisection campaigns. My publications in this area include discussions of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, and of the Strand Magazine more widely.
My next major research project is a consideration of conjuring and secular magic in Victorian and Edwardian fiction, focusing primarily on the influence of conjuring on the fiction of Charles Dickens, but also reading later works such as Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1912). This work will draw upon various critical perspectives (such as the Freudian uncanny and Derrida’s analysis of spectrality and ‘conjurement’) to theorise secular magic as a narrative, and combine these approaches with the attention to material culture that characterises my research. A longer term research interest of mine is in literary and cultural geographies, which I have begun to explore in an article on Cornish psychogeography in the work of Daphne du Maurier and Arthur Quiller-Couch, and upon which I intend to build in a cultural history of the London Underground from the 1860s onwards, looking at the way in which the Underground has consistently been characterised as a pathological space. My wider interests in popular culture are also served by my work on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Culture.
Recent Publications
Monographs
Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011).
Articles
“We are Seeing the Past through the Wrong End of the Telescope: Time, Space and Psychogeography in Castle Dor.” Women: A Cultural Review 20.1 (2009): 57-73.
“The Real Sensation of 1887: Fergus Hume and The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 26.1 (2008): 37-48.
‘Cheap, healthful literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40.1 (2007): 1-23.
Book Chapters and Introductions
“The English Detective Story.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English (Volume 4) 1880-1940. Ed. Patrick Parrinder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
Introduction to H. F. Heard, The Notched Hairpin (Nevada City: Blue Dolphin, 2010).
“Nineteenth-Century Popular Crime Fiction.” The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Lee Horsley and Charles Rzepka (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010).
Book Reviews, Review Essays, and Encyclopaedia Entries
“Psychological Thrillers.” The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of the Gothic. Eds. Andrew Smith, David Punter and William Hughes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011).
Rev. of David James, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. Style 43.1 (2010), pp forthcoming.
“‘The Unknown – with a Capital U!’ Richard Marsh and Victorian Popular Fiction.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 27.1 (2009): 99-103.
“Tracing the Downward Path: Degeneration at the Victorian fin de siècle.” Peer English 2 (2007): 136-42.
Rev. of Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle. Peer English 1 (2006): 77-81.
“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Yellow Face,” “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” “Who Killed Zebedee?” and “The Secret Garden.” The Companion to
the British Short Story. Ed. Andrew Maunder (New York: Facts on File, 2006).
FUNDING AND AWARDS
- British Association for Victorian Studies Postdoctoral Bursary 2008
- Van Arsdel Prize (for Victorian Periodical Research) 2006
- British Association for Victorian Studies Postgraduate Bursary 2004
- Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award 2002-2005