Harriet Stilley
Tutor
- Dr
Background
Harriet holds a MA (Joint Hons), MSc (Distinction), and PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests are located in modern and contemporary American fiction and culture, and specfically within masculinity studies. Harriet is currently working as a postdoctoral tutor in American and English literature at the university.
Undergraduate teaching
Honours:
American Political Fiction since 1945
American Innocence
Pre-Honours
English Literature 2
English Literature 1
Research summary
Harriet’s research focuses on masculinity in late twentieth-century American fiction. Specifically, she is interested in the various ways post-war American authors engage with the tension between late capitalist consumer culture and traditional national conceptions of American manhood. Harriet’s work employs a number of prolific contemporary American writers, including John Cheever, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Michael Herr, together with an investigation into hypermasculine male violence, the classical and grotesque body, serial killer mythology, and specific regional themes such as the Western frontier, the American Adam, the Southern Gothic and the Suburban Gothic. Her wider research interests include twentieth-century feminist and Marxist theory, critiques of postmodernity and late capitalist commodity culture, as well as studies of American history and mythology.
Current research interests
Harriet is currently working on a new project dedicated to the study of Asian American masculinities in twentieth-century crime fiction.Books:
- From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction, 1969-1977. New York: Routledge (In Press: 2018).
Journal Articles:
- "White pussy is nothing but trouble”: Hypermasculine Hysteria and the Displacement of the Feminine Body in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Volume 14, No.1 (Spring 2016). Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.
- “The land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew.” Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park. The European Journal of American Studies. Volume 11, No.2 (Summer 2016).
Reviews:
- Review of Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence, by Maggie McKinley. Journal of American Studies Vol. 50, Issue 4 (November 2016), pp. 1140-1142
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Review of Jonathan Franzen and the Romance of Community: Narratives of Salvation, by Jesus Blanco Hidalga. Journal of American Studies (In Press: 2018)
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Review of Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television, by Brian Baker. European Journal of American Culture (In Press: 2018)
Violence in the American Imagination. Loughborough University, 22-23 July 2015.