Olivia Sutherland is the Isenberg Junior Research Fellow in twentieth-century fiction. Her work focuses broadly on the political affordances of the novel form, alongside the aesthetics of the contemporary period and the recent past. How can the novel best represent a fraught contemporary moment, and trace its unfolding possibilities? What are the sociopolitical capacities of aesthetic form? What does it mean to think historically?
Olivia’s first monograph, currently in progress, is provisionally entitled A Pocket in Time: The Novel, Allusion and the Art of Prophecy in a Presentist Age. It explores the way certain allusive novels position themselves as open-source spaces of shared reference, granting their readers a historical vantage-point for confronting the uncertain future. She is also working on a second project, on the figure of the ‘absent crowd’ in twentieth and twenty-first century fiction. It investigates the question of how the novel can conceive of the crowd at a time when the social and the public seem at their most stretched or unavailable, in nation states both politically polarised and socially disintegrated.
