Dr Mark Rawlinson

Research Interests

Mark Rawlinson works on nineteenth- and twentieth century literature, especially poetry and narrative fiction, with special interests in the literature of war. His writing has focused on the literary culture of wartime Britain (1939-1945), and on the way the meanings of the Second World War have been reassessed in fiction and film since 1945, but he has further interests in literature about the Great War and about conflict in Vietnam. The other chief focuses of his writing and research are literary responses to European and North American urbanization, and the history of English as a university subject.

Current Postgraduate Supervision

Mark Rawlinson has supervised PhD theses on the fiction of Henry Green and on the literature of the Second World War. Current PhD students are at work on the Trinidadian novelist V.S.Naipaul and on James Fraser and nineteenth-century mythography. At MA level he has supervised dissertations on a wide range of topics from James Joyce to the poetry of the Gulf War.

He would welcome inquires from students hoping to do graduate work in the following areas:

• Any literary or cultural aspect of twentieth-century war.
• Twentieth-century British Fiction: particularly 'neglected' mid-century writers (for  instance Jocelyn Brooke, Henry Williamson, Richard Hughes, Alexander Baron).
• Literature and the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
• The literature and culture of rural England after 1870. 
• The intellectual and institutional history of English studies.
• Modernism
• Post-colonial literature.

Recent Publications

Dr Rawlinson is the author of British Writing of the Second World War (Clarendon Press, 2000), 'the most authoritative study so far of the culture of the second world war' ( THES ). He is finishing a sequel, War Stories: The Second World War in British Fiction after 1945 , for which he was awarded AHRB-funded research leave in 2001.

He has written on a wide range of literary, cultural and historical topics, including:

'War Stories' Essays in Criticism , xxxx, 2 (April 1990), 178-184.

'This Other War: British Culture and the Holocaust', Cambridge Quarterly , 25, 1 (1996), 1-25.

'The Flâneur: Literature, History and Urban Theory', in Scenes of Change: Studies in Cultural Transition , eds Carla Dente Baschiera and Jane Everson (Pisa: Editzioni ETS, 1996), 33-45.

'Auden and the Old World: England, Englishness and the Second World War', Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations , 3, 1 (1999), 1-12.

'Adapting the Holocaust: Schindler's List , Intellectuals and Public Knowledge', in Adaptations , eds Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell (Routledge, 1999), 113-27.

'The Decadent University: Narratives of Decay and the Future of Higher Education', Romancing Decay , ed. Michael StJohn (Ashgate, 1999), 235-245.

'Invasion! Coleridge, the defence of Britain and the cultivation of the public's fear', in Romantic War: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793-1822 , ed. Phil Shaw (Ashgate, 2000), 110-37.

'Wild Soldiers: Jocelyn Brooke and England's Militarized Landscape', in Fiction of the Forties , ed. Rod Mengham and Neil Reeves (Macmillan, 2001).

Teaching and Administration

EN3030: Literature 1870-1945, a survey course on late-nineteenth century and Modernist writing.

EN1010: Approaches to Literature, an introductory course about literary studies and literary theory

EN2060: Critical Theory, an advanced survey of the ideas which inform contemporary literary study

EN3078: Love and Death: The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France, a special subject in which students read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert and others in translation, and study realism in its European contexts

MA in Modern Literature

Modernism 1922: the formations of Modernism reassessed through readings of Eliot and Joyce

Mark Rawlinson is Director of Academic Policy for the College of Arts, Humanities and Law. He is a member of the University's Learning and Teaching Committee, its Academic Review Committee, and University Senate.