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?
Research Activities:
Conference Papers
- ‘Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850): Extinction, Survival, and the Fictional Autobiography.’ Re/Writing Crisis: climate, environment and ecocritical imaginaries (Symposium), October 2024, Newcastle University.
- ‘Villette (1853) and Ecological Re-Direction’. Centre For Nineteenth-Century Studies, April 2024, Durham University.
- ‘“To The Second Generation”: Intergenerational Narratives and Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903)’. The International Society For The Study of Narrative, April 2024, Newcastle University.
- ‘Nature Renewing Nature: The “Blessed Hope” of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hardy’. Newcastle SELLL Postgraduate Conference, June 2023, Newcastle University.
Articles
- ‘Some Words With Poe and Stoker: Changing Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature’, Durham Postgraduate English, Spring 2024. Some Words with Poe and Stoker: Changing Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature | Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English (durham.ac.uk
Teaching
Newcastle University
SEL1033: Doing Criticism (2024-5)
SEL1023: Transformations (2024-5)
Memberships
The International Society For The Study of Narrative (2024-5)