Patricia Waugh
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Professor Patricia Waugh (born 25 April 1956) is a
literary critic A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature' ...
,
intellectual historian Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual hist ...
and Professor of English Literature at
Durham University Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...
. She is a leading specialist in
modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
and post-modernist literature,
feminist theory Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or Philosophy, philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's Gender role, social roles, experiences, intere ...
, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on
metafiction Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story ...
and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, ''Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction''. Waugh completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of David Lodge. She joined the Department of English Studies at Durham University in 1989, became a Professor in 1997, and was Head of the Department of English Studies between 2005 and 2008. In 2014, Waugh gave the first lecture, entitled "Fiction as Therapy: Towards a Neo-Phenomenological Theory of the Novel", in the British Academy's Lecture on the Novel in English series. Waugh was invited, in 2015, to contribute to the Chief Scientific Adviser's Report to the Government on Science arguing the case for the importance to scientific development of the humanities. In 2016, she was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are: # Fellows – scholars resident in t ...
. Waugh has won over £5 million in research funding and has been the external examiner of over 90 PhD theses.


Current work

Waugh is completing a monograph entitled, ''The Fragility of Mind in Modernism'' and ''After: Voices in the Risk Society'', examining the relationship between literary cultures and texts and theories and philosophies of mind since 1900. With Marc Botha, she is completing a book project entitled ''Critical Transitions: Genealogies of Intellectual Change'' arising out of her work as PI on a collaborative Leverhulme funded project at Durham University on Tipping Points which examines issues around modelling complex dynamic systems from a humanities and science perspective with respect to climate change, social behaviours, and economic tips. The project is an investigation of radical change: how the new comes into the world. Waugh is also known for her work on literature and science. Her current work includes a collaborative Wellcome Trust-funded project, on which she is PI, with neuroscientists entitled Hearing the Voice. As part of this, she is developing a new monograph on voices in literature, focusing on Virginia Woolf and examining Woolf's experiments with voice in relation to narratological and aesthetic, psychological and philosophical theories of voice and hearing voices and her own experiences as a voice hearer with the medicine of her day.


Bibliography


Monographs

*''Blackwell History of British Fiction: 1945-present'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009)
''Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction''
(London:
Routledge Routledge ( ) is a British multinational corporation, multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, academic journals, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanit ...
, 1984) *''Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature'' (London: Edward Arnold, 1997) *''The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Backgrounds, 1960-1990'' (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) *''Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern'' (Oxford: Routledge, 1989)


Edited works

*''Literary Theory and Criticism: an Oxford Guide'' (Oxford:
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...
, 2006) *With Philip Rice, ''Modern Literary Theory: A Reader'' (New York: Hodder Arnold, 2001) *With David Fuller, ''The Arts and Science of Criticism'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)


References


External links


Durham University staff profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Waugh, Patricia Academics of Durham University American literary critics American women literary critics Living people 1956 births Alumni of the University of Birmingham