Hailing from Brighton, I completed my undergraduate and MPhil degrees at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before undertaking a year of doctoral work at the University of Sussex. When my supervisor, Peter Boxall, moved to the University of Oxford, I transferred to the same institution, and am beginning the second year of my DPhil at New College.
My thesis identifies literary allusion as an old technique used by a range of contemporary novelists in an innovative way. In this mode, allusion to older texts can re-situate us in textual traditions with which we have lost meaningful contact, and thus grant us a language of shared intertexts, with which we might articulate our speculations, predictions and dreams of the future. I call such allusion ‘vatic’, or prophetic. My thesis works across a transatlantic range of novelists, including Claire-Louise Bennett, Ben Lerner, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead and Ali Smith.
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