James Inkster
Doctoral Student in Literature - James’s thesis is entitled ‘Self-Preservation: Aging, Extinction and The Fictional Autobiography’.
Research Project Title:
Self-Preservation: Aging, Extinction and The Fictional Autobiography
Supervisors:
Dr Jacob Jewusiak, Dr Ella Dzelzainis + Dr Ella Mershon
Contact Details:
Email: j.inkster2@ncl.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Nineteenth-Century Literature
- Memory
- Biography
- Time
- Age Theory
- Ecocriticism
Brief Outline of Research Project:
My project reveals how authors from across the Long Nineteenth Century respond to the aging of individual selves and the extinction of species through a particular literary form: the fictional autobiography. As an elastic imitation of its non-fictional counterpart, the fictional autobiography expands a bounded archival structure into something with unbounded imaginative scope. It can therefore envisage an array of hypothetical self-preserving strategies — the deferral of death through the suspension of narrative time, for example, or the relatively instant creation of an intergenerational archive – and it is able to interrogate contemporary theories of survival like Malthusianism and Social Darwinism. Reading texts by William Thackeray (Barry Lyndon, 1844), Charlotte Brontë (Villette, 1853), Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh, 1873-1903) and others, I argue that through their fictionalization of such strategies, these works wrestle with the morality and biopolitics of nineteenth-century attempts at self-preservation, and they offer some answers to the questions that still haunt us now. Who – and what – deserves to be preserved?