BA (Warwick), MA (Sussex), DPhil (Oxford), FRLS, FEA

Professor of Modern English Literature

Contact Details:

• E: maj@le.ac.uk

• T: +44 (0)116 252 2621

Research Interests

Martin Stannard has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, following The Critical Heritage (1984) with a major biography in two volumes (1986 and 1992). The first volume was selected by the New York Times as one of the twelve best books of the year; the second was chosen by Frank Kermode, Jonathan Raban, William Trevor and Muriel Spark as one of their ‘Books of the Year’, and in the year 2000 by William Boyd as one of his TLS ‘Books of the Millennium’.

In August 2009 Prof. Stannard published his biography of Muriel Spark to great critical acclaim from, among others, Frank Kermode, Jonathan Bate, John Carey, Ferdinand Mount, Ian Rankin, Frances Wilson and David Lodge. He has also published essays and review-essays on Kingsley Amis, Michael Arlen, Dickens, Ford Madox Ford, David Garnett, Graham Greene, William Gerhardie, Christopher Isherwood, and Philip Larkin, and on the subjects of textual criticism, biography, autobiography and letters.

In 1995 he published the Norton Critical Edition of Ford’s The Good Soldier, an experiment in textual editing which includes material engaging with the challenge of literary theory to traditional editorial practice, and with the phenomenon of ‘literary impressionism’. He has just completed work on the second edition of this book which should appear in 2011.

Martin’s broad research interests are in British Catholic convert fiction, biography and non-fiction generally, and in the theory and practice of textual editing. He has served as a member of the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, chairs the Arts Faculty’s MA in Humanities, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association, and is President of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society.

Projects

Current Postgraduate Supervision

Professor Stannard has recently supervised PhD theses on James Joyce and Dante, H G Wells, an edition of Ford Madox Ford's poems, Ford and Literary Impressionism, Simon Raven, Aldous Huxley and Postcolonialism, Evelyn Waugh.

He would be happy to supervise any topic in the following areas:

• 20th-century British Catholic Writing (e.g. Greene, Spark, Waugh, etc.)
• 20th-century Non-Fiction
• Modernism
• Modern literature and aesthetics/theology
• The theory of biography
• Modern Scholarly Editing

Teaching and Administration

• EN1010: Reading English
• EN3030: Victorian to Modern: Literature 1870-1945
• EN3040: Post War to Postmodern Literature 1945 - Present Day

Recent Publications

Books

(Forthcoming)Second, revised edition of The Good Soldier (Norton, 2011).

Muriel Spark: The Biography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009; Norton 2010), 640 pp.

General Editor with Prof. Greg Walker of thirty-seven volume series, Studies in European Cultural Transition (Ashgate: 2000 - 2007).

Articles

(Forthcoming) ‘Venice Observed: East Meets West in Muriel Spark’s Territorial Rights’ (5,000-word essay)

‘Cutting Remarks: What Went Missing From The Good Soldier’, in Jason Harding (ed.), Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 229-42 (5,000-word essay). 

‘Muriel Spark’, New DNB Supplement (Jan. 2010, 7,000 words)

‘Meeting Muriel Spark’, Sunday Times, Books, 26 July, 2009, 8-9 (3,000-word article).

Full list of publications