David James

Before joining the University of Birmingham as a Professorial Research Fellow in 2017, I was Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Prior to my appointment at QM, I held a lectureship in modern literature for a number of years at the University of Nottingham. For my BA I undertook a joint honours English and Drama programme at the University of Birmingham, moving then to Oxford University for a Masters in Women's Studies, after which I pursued a DPhil on the contemporary novel at the University of Sussex.

While focusing on the history and poetics of postwar Anglophone fiction, I've been working in and across both modernist studies and contemporary writing for some years, thereby trying to think about how these fields might have useful conversations with each other.

My other key areas of focus include postcolonial fiction and theory, Black British writing, affect theory, critical genealogies of postmodernism, the politics of form, and the history of emotions. Such points of interest have synthesised through a number of collaborative projects. These include two special issues, one of the journal Contemporary Literature ('Fiction since 2000: Postmillennial Commitments' guest-edited with Andrzej Gasiorek) that appeared in winter 2012, and the other of Modernist Cultures ('Musicality and Modernist Form', co-edited with Nathan Waddell) in 2013. I have longstanding interests in the history of critical method, which motivated my most recent edited collection, Modernism and Close Reading (Oxford University Press, 2020).

I serve as Editor for British and World Anglophone Writing at the journal Contemporary Literature, and with Matthew Hart (Columbia) and Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers) I am founding co-editor of the book series 'Literature Now' at Columbia University Press. For more information:

http://cup.columbia.edu/series/literature-now

I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2013, which assisted the development of my last book, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book argues that while we tend to think of literary solace in terms of the edifying or even therapeutic aspects of reading, consolation makes more unusual, improbable and often paradoxical appearances in the formal textures of contemporary writing, when style becomes the engine of redress. Considering memoir as well as fiction, I engage with the work of Julian Barnes, J. M. Coetzee, Joan Didion, David Grossman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Helen Macdonald, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, and Colm Tóibín, among others, revealing the way literature’s most animating consolations derive from the most unlikely idioms and genres. Narratives associated with the pathos of bereavement, deprivation, and personal or environmental catastrophe also produce their own dynamic if seemingly discrepant modes of mitigation and resistance. By close-reading these modes, the book shows how agilely fiction and life-writing can at once intensify and scrutinize form’s own propensity to be an antagonist of loss. 

More information about Discrepant Solace can be found here:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/discrepant-solace-9780198789758?q=Discrepant%20Solace&lang=en&cc=gb#


I'm currently at work on Sentimental Activism (under contract with Columbia University Press), a book about the political contours of sympathy, compassion, outrage, and pity (among other sentimental structures of feeling) in a variety of contemporary genres, including medical advocacy, refugee testimony, poverty fiction, and pathography. Bringing together the health humanities, narrative medicine, disability studies, the writing of humanitarianism, and the history of emotions, I develop close readings of the political potency and ethical reflexivity of sentimental aesthetics in the work of writers and activists who have yet to be considered in conversation. Research for Sentimental Activism has been funded in 2020/21 by the Leverhulme Trust.