Evie is a first-year DPhil candidate in the English Faculty, whose thesis asks the question: How does emergency shape literary form?
Emergency Times, Emergent Forms interrogates the literary responses to emergency in the 1935 – 1937 works of American journalist Martha Gellhorn, American poet Muriel Rukeyser, and British writer Rebecca West. Building on the idea that political crisis necessarily demands a reactive reappraisal of existing literary forms, it argues that what emerges out of emergency is formal hybridity in these writers’ works. Emergency literary genres require an equivalent emergency critical response. The hybrid works of Gellhorn, West and Rukeyser mandate a methodology of real-time reading, which is distinctive both in time and space. The critic as myops pays attention to both autobiographical and historical details, analysing minutely how form is adopted, adapted and reformed in exceptional times in the mid-twentieth century through a method of ‘super-close reading’ of primary texts and their preparatory documents.
Evie completed her BA in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019 – 2022). She was funded by the Cambridge Trust for the MPhil in English at Newnham College, University of Cambridge (2024 – 2025). Her DPhil is fully funded for four years by the Oxford-Helena Kennedy Graduate Crankstart Scholarship at Mansfield College.
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