Professor Nicky Marsh is Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities'
My research is on late 20th and 21st century British and American literatures, theories of gender, postmodernism, poetics and economics.
Nicky Marsh discussing some of the main themes of her recent research on the intersections between finance and culture.
The majority of my research is on the intersections between finance and culture, I examine the ways in which economic ideas - money, risk, credit and debt - have been given an imaginary form. Within this I have focused on three broad areas.
Firstly, I work collaboratively on thinking about finance's representations within the public sphere. I co-curated the national touring exhibition, Show me the Money: The Image of Finance. This exhibition was funded by the AHRC and Arts Council, amongst others, and was shown in five locations across the UK in two years. This collaborative team is now working on a second large AHRC project on the History of Financial Advice. This project examines the emergence of a distinctive genre of personal financial advice, tracing it from the personal correspondence of banking families in the Eighteenth century to popular culture in the Twentieth.
Secondly, I have just completed a monograph on finance and American fiction. This book, which examines writers such as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Jane Rule, examines how novelists responded to the ending of the Gold Standard in the early 1970s, the moment when money stopped having a value outside of itself. It argues that these novelists offered a deeply historicised understanding of what this shift meant to American culture and to a new moment of American imperialism, one the troubles received notions of it as the origin of a 'free floating' money for the postmodern era.
Finally, I also work on the ways in which economic ideas are inflected by questions of gender. This is the central concern of my new work which examines how modernists - such as Mina Loy, Zora Neale Hurston, Ezra Pound and F Scott Fitzgerald - treated money. This project is particularly interested in the ways in which modernists worked critically with the vocabulary for money that was coming from thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes in the opening decades of the century.
I welcome applications for postgraduate study of contemporary British or American fiction and poetry. I have particular interests in experimental or late modernist writing, gender and feminism, democracy and the public, and literary economics.
The project involved visits and readings by leading international writers, a conference on international migration, and creative writing workshops with local schoolchildren.
The History of Financial Advice' provides the first thorough study of a genre of writing that has amassed a huge readership, and had major social and economic effects, but which has remained largely neglected by cultural and economic historians and by literary critics. As Lendol Calder writes in the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012), 'the print culture that helped people make sense of money through financial advice', still 'awaits its historian', despite the fact that 'concerns about money - how to get it, how to save it, how to invest, multiply and spend it - have likely sold more books in the last two hundred years than any other subject after religion'.
Literature and Globalization (ed with Liam Connell) (London: Routledge, 2010)
This collection is the first to map the complex ways in which literature has contributed to the interdisciplinary debates surrounding contemporary models of globalization. Its three sections provide a survey of the key positions within globalization studies, an account of the reception of globalization studies within English studies, and a range of case studies exploring how globalization has impacted upon the reading, teaching and writing of contemporary literature.
Teaching Modernist Poetry (ed with Peter Middleton) (London: Palgrave, 2010)
This collection of essays offers new ways of teaching the long history of 20th and 21st century modernisms. It addresses issues including modernism and science, modernism and gender, modernism and race, digital poetry, creative writing and the modernist inheritance.
Money, Finance, and Speculation in Recent British Fiction (London: Continuum, 2007)
This book examines the range of strategies that contemporary fiction has offered for revealing, countering, and qualifying the disabling mystification sustained by money’s ‘fictiousness’ - its ability to be everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing. It suggests that contemporary fiction has interrogated this powerful rhetoric through making apparent the self-revelations inherent in the dissembling languages of discipline and pleasure that have persistently constructed and supported the money economy. It draws on the contemporary economies of Keynes, Friedman and Hayek and reads them against novels including Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, Martin Amis’ Money, and Alan Hollinghurst’s Line of Beauty.
Democracy in Contemporary US Women’s Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2007)
‘American Literary Readings in the 21st Century’ series, ed by Linda Martin-Wagner.
This book analyses the contributions of contemporary women poets to discussions about the democratic tradition in US literary culture. It reads the increasingly public interventions of women poets through recent gender theory, specifically debates about citizenship and publicness, and suggests that this poetry offers new kinds of democratic cultures and possibilities. Poets examined in the work include Susan Howe, June Jordan, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forche, Harryette Mullen, and Juliana Spahr.
Room Number: 65/2027