Dewi Evans | Cardiff University (original) (raw)
I read English Language and Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, before completing my MA and PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University. My doctoral thesis focused on the role of books and reading in the writings of Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, M.R. James and E.M. Forster.
My research interests encompass literature and culture from circa 1800 to 1945, with a particular focus on the Victorian and Edwardian period. I have a particular interest in book history and print culture, the supernatural, literary representations of the male body and the relationship between literature and archaeology.
I currently teach (with Dr Claire O'Callaghan) an undergraduate module on the Nineteenth-Century Novel, at Brunel University.
I have recently set up a blog offering free, carefully-formatted ebooks of supernatural, gothic and horror literature for students, academics and general readers: gothictexts.wordpress.com. I also have an interest in crime fiction and maintain an occasional informal blog, 'Re-Reading Agatha Christie' (http://stylesofdying.wordpress.com/).
Supervisors: Dr Anthony Mandal and Professor David Skilton
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Papers by Dewi Evans
Journal of Stevenson Studies, Volume 9, pp. 149-170, Nov 2012
The essay examines how Stevenson's series of essays for Scribner's magazine in 1888 consolidates ... more The essay examines how Stevenson's series of essays for Scribner's magazine in 1888 consolidates his earlier writings on ethical and aesthetic questions, and resolves some of the apparent contradictions of these earlier essays.
See the link below for more information on this paper in the context of the journal's wider aims.
englishjournal.blogs.ilrt.org, Jul 2012
The article examines Oscar Wilde’s anxieties about the effects that obtain when texts are viewed ... more The article examines Oscar Wilde’s anxieties about the effects that obtain when texts are viewed as transparent expressions of truths by and about their authors. I begin by examining how Wilde's concerns about the reception of Keats's love letters foreshadowed the reception of Wilde's own 'confession', posthumously published as De Profundis (1905). I then show how Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) dramatises Wilde's concerns about the ways in which the relationship between text and author is conceived. The play presents a world in which books serve as instruments with which individual subjects can be robbed of their autonomy - a world that is as alarming as it is amusing. I provide a Foucauldian reading of the play, and argue that, within the play's narrative, notebooks, novels and reference works have a panoptic effect, enshrining the parameters for an examination to which the play’s older characters constantly and forcibly submit the younger protagonists.
Crimeculture, Summer 2007
Critiquing critical approaches that dismiss Christie's use of psychoanalysis as unsophisticated a... more Critiquing critical approaches that dismiss Christie's use of psychoanalysis as unsophisticated and naive, this essay argues that her crime fiction betrays a more subtle understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis than many critics have supposed. Rather than examining Christie's characters for psychological 'depth', I argue that Christie presents the act of murder itself as parapractic, a societal equivalent of the Freudian 'slip of the tongue'. The murder plot brings to the surface and examines the repressed tensions of the communities in which they occur - tensions which the detectives' neat resolutions only superficially resolve.
This paper is based on an assessed essay written whilst studying for an MA module on literary theory, convened at Cardiff in 2006 by Dr Neil Badmington. I also gratefully acknowledge the imput of Dr Kara Tennant, conversations with whom originated the idea for this paper.
Talks by Dewi Evans
The paper illustrates how debates about ways of ‘reading’ the past at the turn of the twentieth c... more The paper illustrates how debates about ways of ‘reading’ the past at the turn of the twentieth century intersect with concerns about the emergence of a mass reading public in the wake of the 1870 Education Act. Focusing on the work of M.R. James and E.M. Forster, I argue that the former’s concern about the emergence of archaeology as a ‘professional’ method of reading the past – in contrast to the avocational antiquarianism it superseded – resembles Forster’s concerns about the emergence of ‘literature’ as a pedagogical tool. James and Forster’s fictions both depict readers whose understanding of the texts they consume is hindered by an inability to grasp their own role, as readers, in composing the textual ‘message’ of that which they read. This leads to an obtuse refusal to read against the grain, ensuring a continual subservience to ideologies that dominate the ways in which texts are produced and read.
Journal of Stevenson Studies, Volume 9, pp. 149-170, Nov 2012
The essay examines how Stevenson's series of essays for Scribner's magazine in 1888 consolidates ... more The essay examines how Stevenson's series of essays for Scribner's magazine in 1888 consolidates his earlier writings on ethical and aesthetic questions, and resolves some of the apparent contradictions of these earlier essays.
See the link below for more information on this paper in the context of the journal's wider aims.
englishjournal.blogs.ilrt.org, Jul 2012
The article examines Oscar Wilde’s anxieties about the effects that obtain when texts are viewed ... more The article examines Oscar Wilde’s anxieties about the effects that obtain when texts are viewed as transparent expressions of truths by and about their authors. I begin by examining how Wilde's concerns about the reception of Keats's love letters foreshadowed the reception of Wilde's own 'confession', posthumously published as De Profundis (1905). I then show how Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) dramatises Wilde's concerns about the ways in which the relationship between text and author is conceived. The play presents a world in which books serve as instruments with which individual subjects can be robbed of their autonomy - a world that is as alarming as it is amusing. I provide a Foucauldian reading of the play, and argue that, within the play's narrative, notebooks, novels and reference works have a panoptic effect, enshrining the parameters for an examination to which the play’s older characters constantly and forcibly submit the younger protagonists.
Crimeculture, Summer 2007
Critiquing critical approaches that dismiss Christie's use of psychoanalysis as unsophisticated a... more Critiquing critical approaches that dismiss Christie's use of psychoanalysis as unsophisticated and naive, this essay argues that her crime fiction betrays a more subtle understanding of Freudian psychoanalysis than many critics have supposed. Rather than examining Christie's characters for psychological 'depth', I argue that Christie presents the act of murder itself as parapractic, a societal equivalent of the Freudian 'slip of the tongue'. The murder plot brings to the surface and examines the repressed tensions of the communities in which they occur - tensions which the detectives' neat resolutions only superficially resolve.
This paper is based on an assessed essay written whilst studying for an MA module on literary theory, convened at Cardiff in 2006 by Dr Neil Badmington. I also gratefully acknowledge the imput of Dr Kara Tennant, conversations with whom originated the idea for this paper.
The paper illustrates how debates about ways of ‘reading’ the past at the turn of the twentieth c... more The paper illustrates how debates about ways of ‘reading’ the past at the turn of the twentieth century intersect with concerns about the emergence of a mass reading public in the wake of the 1870 Education Act. Focusing on the work of M.R. James and E.M. Forster, I argue that the former’s concern about the emergence of archaeology as a ‘professional’ method of reading the past – in contrast to the avocational antiquarianism it superseded – resembles Forster’s concerns about the emergence of ‘literature’ as a pedagogical tool. James and Forster’s fictions both depict readers whose understanding of the texts they consume is hindered by an inability to grasp their own role, as readers, in composing the textual ‘message’ of that which they read. This leads to an obtuse refusal to read against the grain, ensuring a continual subservience to ideologies that dominate the ways in which texts are produced and read.