About

In October 2013 I began an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project on French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era. This project involves a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on linking close textual readings to larger cultural, social and political issues.

In 2012 I published a monograph on ‘non-political’ fiction of the 1790s as a response to the trauma of the Revolution (Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford, Legenda, 2012)). The work for this was funded by a British Academy Small Grant and an AHRC matching leave grant. The research has shown how the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of writers’ traumatised response to the Revolution. Significantly, it is the writers who experience emigration and who would go on to be the avant-garde of the Romantic movement in France who succeed in working through their responses to the Revolution, while lesser writers remain trapped in the repetitive cycle of reliving the trauma without fully acknowledging the memories.

My first book on The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750-1789, examining the development of short fiction in the two countries in the years leading up to the French Revolution, was published by the Voltaire Foundation as SVEC 2002:7. Much of my work is centred on questions of literary history and the thorny problem of literary influence.

I have published on many of the principal figures of the 18th century and their relationship to short fiction. This includes Prévost, Beaumarchais, Marmontel, Baculard d’Arnaud and Sade. I have edited ‘Memnon ou la sagesse humaine’ for the Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. In 2003-04 I had a grant from the British Academy to look at fiction and the literary press during the Revolution. A number of articles based on this research are now in print.

I also have an interest in women writers of the late eighteenth century, working on the SIEFAR Grand dictionnaire des femmes de l’ancienne France and in collaboration with Suzan van Dijk on an international project on the reception of women writers funded by the NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). I am also part of the AHRC-funded team working on the correspondence of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, collaborating with Catriona Seth (Nancy) on the letters of Bernardin’s sister, Catherine.