An aerial view of Singleton Campus and the bay opposite
Dr Richard Robinson

Dr Richard Robinson

Associate Professor, English Literature

Telephone number

+44 (0) 1792 602796

Welsh language proficiency

Basic Welsh Speaker
Office - 210
Second Floor
Keir Hardie Building
Singleton Campus
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Dr Richard Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing. He works in twentieth-century and contemporary writing, with a particular interest in modernism and its afterlife, Irish Studies, border studies (specifically, representations of Central Europe), and aspects of Italian film and fiction. He is the author of two monographs, Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007) and John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has published widely on writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Rebecca West and John McGahern, and is currently developing a collaborative project on style, considered as a concept in literary criticism, theory and philosophy. Currently he is co-editing (with Dr Barry Sheils) a special issue of Textual Practice on ‘The Contemporary Problem of Style’, in which he considers the intersection of style and dialect in the work of Elena Ferrante. Richard has supervised a number of PhDs to completion, and welcomes further projects in the specialist fields above. He was recently the Department’s Programme Director and has been Exams Officer and Admissions Officer.

Areas Of Expertise

  • Modernist and Contemporary Writing in English, including Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Irish Studies, including James Joyce and John McGahern
  • Border studies, with a particular interest in representations of Central Europe
  • Theories of style
  • Modern Italian literature

Career Highlights

Research

John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007)

‘“Not Even a Shadow of Violence”: Undead History in John McGahern’s Anglo-Irish Stories’, in Assessing a Literary Legacy: Essays on John McGahern, eds Eamon Maher and Derek Hand (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019)

‘The Violation of Style: Englishness in Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels’, co-written with Barry Sheils, Textual Practice 29:6 (2015) 1-22

‘An Umbrella, a Pair of Boots and a “Spacious Nothing”: McGahern and Beckett’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 44: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2014) 323-40

‘That Dubious Enterprise, the Irish Short Story: Dubliners and The Untilled Field’, in James Joyce and the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Modern Fiction Studies, 56:3 (Fall 2010) 473-95

‘“The Dangerous Edge of Things”: Geopolitical Bodies and Cold War fiction’, in Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War, ed. Petra Rau (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.185-204

‘“To Give a Name, Is that Still to Give?” Footballers and Film Actors in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’, in Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Kazuo Ishiguro, eds. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (Continuum, 2009), pp.67-78

‘Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe’, in Critical Quarterly, 48:4 (2006) 107-30

‘Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space’, in Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, eds. Sebastian D.G. Knowles, Geert Lernout and John McCourt (University Press of Florida, 2007), pp.170-87

‘From Border to Front: Italo Svevo’s La Coscienza di Zeno and International Space’, in Journal of European Studies, 36:3 (2006) 243-68