Professor Fiona Becket

Profile

Teaching and research in modern and contemporary literature.

My first book D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997) is a study of metaphor as a mode of understanding in Lawrence which concentrates on the fiction and discursive writing, especially his two books on the unconscious. It is a study which is informed by Heidegger's thought on language. I examined the life, work and critical contexts informing Lawrence studies in The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (2002). Since then I have had other opportunities to write on Lawrence and language, reception of his work, psychoanalysis, the Blues, consciousness, ecology and environmental philosophy. I recently began a project on Lawrence's poetry, ecology and consciousness, and have written several chapters/articles on Lawrence, Powys and other writers of the modernist period, eco-poetics and eco-criticism. I have also written on contemporary poetry, with a special interest in British and Irish poetry, and eco-poetics. Currently, my largest project is a book-length study of poetry and technology in the post-War, pre-computer period which in part examines the notion of the 'extended poet' (Ian Hamilton Finlay); and I am curating an exhibition of visual and concrete poetry based on the holdings in the Brotherton Library special collections.

My interests in environmental philosophy were first represented in a  book with an interdisciplinary focus co-edited with Terry Gifford (Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, 2007). I have a sustained interest in the area of green cultural critique and the environmental humanities and I am interested in supervising doctoral work in this area. I welcome research proposals from potential students in any area of literary modernism, D. H. Lawrence studies; eco-criticism and green cultural critique; twentieth-century British and Irish writing; modern and contemporary poetry; visual and concrete poetry (Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing, Thomas Clark, Edwin Morgan and the much under-represented women experimental poets of the post-war period, up to the contemporary moment. Applications from doctoral students who wish to use the resources of the Brotherton Library, and the special collections are welcome.

I have supervised research students working on a range of topics which include representations of nature in the work of John Cowper Powys; the green poetics of Jon Silkin and Simon Armitage; modernist poetry and Jung; olfactory sensation in modernist writing. Former supervisees have worked on topics which include theorisations of the object in contemporary and Anglo-Saxon poetry; a comparative study of W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore; Ted Hughes and eco-poetics; James Joyce and irreverance, Salman Rushdie, Djuna Barnes, George Orwell, Rachel Carson.

Responsibilities

• Head of School

Research interests

Modernist and Contemporary Literature; Eco-poetics and Eco-criticism; post-war poetry including avant-garde and experimental with a specialism in concrete and visual poetics; literature & environments.

Qualifications

• PhD English Literature
• MA in English Literature
• BA in English Literature
• Diploma in Polish Language

Professional memberships

• British Association of Modernist Sudies
• Association of the Study of Literature and Environment

Student education

While I carry the responsibility of Head of School my undergraduate teaching is restricted to the supervision of Final Year Projects and, if required, selected core modules. MA dissertation supervision. PhD supervision.

Research groups and institutes

• Environmental Humanities Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Charlotte Makepeace
• Izzy Jenkinson
• Jon Gilbert