Dr Richard Robinson

Research Highlights

1. Robinson, R. (2023). “Many Strange Tongues” in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?. English Studies, 0, 1-20.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838x.2022.2150941, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa61930
2. Robinson, R. (2022). A Problem of Middlebrow Style: Dialect and Translation in Elena Ferrante’s Naples Tetralogy. Textual Practice, 36(4), 582-604.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2022.2030514, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa59154
3. Robinson, R. & Sheils, B. (2022). The contemporary problem of style. Textual Practice, 36(4), 473-500.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2022.2030510, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa59153
4. Robinson, R. (2016). John McGahern and Modernism (1st. ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.

   https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472544117, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa30108

   https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/john-mcgahern-and-modernism-9781441125781
5. Robinson, R. & Sheils, B. (2015). The Violation of Style: Englishness in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels. Textual Practice, 1-22.

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1059030, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa22013

All Research

• Other traces of Italy: Giacomo Leopardi and James Joyce’s works. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Roberta Magnani

• A novel of the women's revolution. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Francesca Rhydderch

• Arnold Bennett: A Critical Re-evaluation of his novels and literary criticism (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Daniel Williams

• The philosophy and legal systems of totalitarian regimes in twentieth-century literature. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Daniel Williams

• Iris Murdoch, Elias Canetti and Sadomasochism (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Julian Preece

• Technology, Techne and Text in 21st Century Poetics (awarded 2023)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Rachel Farebrother

• EN-120 English Essentials

  This is a skills-based module which will equip students with the technical and critical expertise that is necessary for their academic journey in English Literature and Creative Writing. It is designed to support the transition from post-16 study to undergraduate study and to show students *how* to become successful scholars of English. How should we read texts? How do we write essays? Focusing on an exciting anthology of texts selected by the English academics at Swansea, this team-taught module uncovers the power of written language. We will explore how writers inspire and challenge their readers, how to think critically, how to close-read, how to construct powerful arguments and how to produce written work that is rigorous, academic and convincing. This module empowers students to think, write, and persuade.

• EN-206 Debating Texts: Theory in Literature

  Literature prompts debate, and speaks to us differently depending on the questions that we ask of it. This course looks at how our understanding of meaning in literature changes when we think about critical debates concerning the role of history, language and subjectivity in texts. We take three very different texts from different periods, and look at the ways in which the texts (and debates around them) raise questions of history, language and subjectivity, and how the texts comment on these issues. We begin with a classic of 19th century realism, Charles Dickens's HARD TIMES (1854), move on to the groundbreaking work of modernist experiment, Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY (1925), and end with a powerful example of postmodern representation, Toni Morrison's BELOVED (1987). The course will be taught by a formal lecture followed by a discussion forum, in which short passages of literary and theoretical text will be read and debated in the lecture theatre.

• EN-207 Revolution of the Word: Modernism

  An introduction to Modernist literature, focussing upon its origins in response to the crisis of modernity, its engagement with colonialism and the First World War, its formal experimentation, its depiction of city-life and its engagement with new ideas of gender and the unconscious.

• EN-241 Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain

  The nationality question has been a persistent theme in British politics, most obviously in recent decades in relationship to questions of immigration and settlement, Britain¿s membership of Europe, the `troubles¿ and `peace process¿ in Ulster, and the resurgence of forms of devolution and nationalism in Wales and Scotland. This course explores the ways in which the diverse literatures of the British Isles have responded to, and shaped, debates around these issues. The questions asked on the course will include: How does a `four nations¿ approach, well-established in historical studies, function in literary studies? What are the key differences and similarities between the literatures produced in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales? To what extent does literature reflect social identities, and to what extent is it active in their creation? If all identities are in as sense `imagined¿, why have certain kinds of identities been significant in particular periods? Is an aesthetics informed by nationalism inevitably conservative and restrictive? Are linguistically experimental writers always skeptical of collective identities? Are we witnessing the `break up¿ of Britain in contemporary literature, or is Britishness being reconstructed anew?

• EN-3029 Postmodernist and Post-war Fiction

  This course examines fiction of the mid-to-late twentieth century some of which, marked by a formal self-consciousness, has been referred to as postmodernist. The usefulness of this category, regarded as a chronological period after modernism or as a self-reflexive narrative poetics, will be tested. In the first part of the module, we study a displaced testimony of war which incorporates science fiction, a classic work of historiographic metafiction, and a novella in which a woman takes charge of her own murder. In these narratives, questions of authority, authorship and language are closely linked. We will also consider how the problem of representing history is bound to the disruption of realist form. More recent novels are also concerned with the transmission of history, the consolation of memory and the comforts of mimetic realism.

• EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

  The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module designed to develop high-level academic skills and intellectual independence in the students. A first-semester skills-building programme will include: research skills, summary skills, bibliographic skills, ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation of a thesis and bibliography, presentational skills and public speaking. Students conduct research on a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of the English literature staff. The topic will be devised to fall within staff research and teaching specialisms, broadly defined. Students attend group sessions on research skills in Semesters 1 and 2, and have individual meetings with supervisors in Semester 2.

• EN-3060 Philosophy and Literature

  Much significant literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century dramatizes ethical and metaphysical questions that are central to the study of philosophy. Plays, novels and poems by writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera and Ingeborg Bachmann enhance our understanding of ethical plights, moral choices, questions of loyalty, affiliation and commitment, the relationship between art, science, political power and freedom, as well as between self and other, language and gender. Literature makes manifest universal philosophical questions. Nevertheless, these texts are marked by the particular disfigurements of twentieth-century history, and our approach will also reveal how these representations of historical trauma, political oppression and social alienation speak of the immediacy and relevance of both philosophical enquiry and literary interpretation.

• EN-M31 Dissertation

  Individual project devised and defined in discussion between supervisor and student.

• EN-M41 Research Practice in English / Contemporary Writing / Welsh Writing in English

  Supervised project on research methodology in practice. Students build a detailed bibliographical plan for their MA dissertation project.

• EN-M69 James Joyce and Literary Theory

  This module is centred on the detailed study of the magnus opus of the Anglophone modernist novel, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). We begin by considering the relationship between late nineteenth century naturalism (in fiction and drama) and symbolism ( in poetry) and how these aesthetic tensions informed Joyce's early development into what we now call a modernist writer. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man introduces us to Stephen Dedalus as he formulates his theories of language and art: this is an ironic Bildungsroman of a writer not yet capable of composing Ulysses. Our study of Ulysses concentrates on individual chapters, or pairs of chapters, which are tied to modernist thematics. We discuss the following:the transformation of the supposedly omniscient narrative voice into that of the impersonal "Arranger" of the artwork; the mind of Stephen and the body of Bloom, or soul and matter; debates between Irish cultural nationalism (voiced by the Citizen) and utopian cosmopolitanism (voiced by Bloom, a Jewish Irishman); a parody of the history of English letters and of rationalist encyclopaedism; Molly's interior life, and how mimetically it is rendered. As an aftertaste, we then scrutinise an excerpt- a mere twenty six pages - of Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Shem the Penman" is, by now a late modernist portrait of the exiled artist. We conclude by tracing Joyce's critical reputation ( not always as secure as it is now0 in Ireland, the United States and Britain, and touch on ways in which signs of Joycean textuality are to be found in more recent fiction.

• EN-M80 Practising Ideas: Advanced Research Skills in English / Contemporary Writing / Welsh Writing in English

  This module is designed to introduce you to key practical and conceptual tools necessary for scholarship at Master¿s level and beyond. The aim is for you to gain the competencies and confidence to complete and enjoy the degree. In a seminar and occasional workshop format, you will practise a range of core professional research skills. You will be encouraged to reflect on your own learning and academic development to become a more independent and self-directed lifelong learner. You will produce a Portfolio of assessed work. These activities will support your work in other MA modules, particularly EN-M41 Research Practice and your EN-M31 Dissertation, while also equipping you with a set of transferable skills that are highly valued by many employers.

• Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, Swansea University

  September 2007 - Present