Bridgeable Gaps: The Writer, the Critic, and the University, 1958-2000

Williams, Joseph (2024) Bridgeable Gaps: The Writer, the Critic, and the University, 1958-2000. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This is a thesis about the postwar British university and its relation to contemporary literary culture. This relation is considered by examining the creative, critical, and educational work of four figures: the first three are Malcolm Bradbury, Lorna Sage and David Lodge, and the fourth ‘figure’ is the journal Critical Quarterly, founded by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson in 1958. These five individuals began working as academics in English departments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when F. R. Leavis’s influence over the discipline was still widespread. They taught, researched, and wrote throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, that period in which the discipline of English was the dominant subject of the humanities in British universities. This was also a time of major social and intellectual changes in and around the institution of the British university, beginning first with the establishment of the seven ‘new’ universities between 1961 and 1965 and the further expansion of British universities after the 1963 Robbins Report, and then catalysed both by the May 1968 student protests in Paris and the later dissemination of continental literary theory, most notably poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism as practiced by the French critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, among others. Throughout this period, Bradbury, Lodge, Sage, Cox and Dyson shaped university English in important ways, not least by establishing Creative Writing within the discipline. These five did not simply adopt or reject wholesale the developments of continental literary theory, but rather modified the Leavisism of their intellectual formation to be more open to both literary theory and contemporary creative practice, as well as other cultural developments such as television, American literature and, crucially, the comic novel. What emerges from the work of these five figures – who are, if not a loose group then certainly a network of acquaintances – is a theory of the novel which is dialogic, comic, creative, and critical.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	27 Mar 2025 09:24
Last Modified:	27 Mar 2025 09:24
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98887
DOI:

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