About

"My research will explore the presences of fairies in literary modernism alongside early fantasy film and photography, and utilise the fairy to reimagine archival practice. Fairies are ephemeral, inhabiting unexplored paths on the map and gaps in rationality. As with archival materials, fairies are also, in the sense of tales passed down across eras, enduring. Moreover, people have historically searched for evidence of fairies, documented by Katharine Briggs, Lady Gregory, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Uniting discourses on the search for fairies and that of archived media, I will address the fairy’s pertinence to literary modernist perceptions of shyness. Despite the wealth of criticism on modernism and film, much criticism reduces the literary movement to its concern with reality and the mundane. Focusing on fantasy, I will form an original reading of literary modernism as alive to quiet feelings (including shyness, nostalgia, and grief) that challenge realism, instead taking shape in unreal projections.

Much modernist criticism understands shyness as a ‘recoil’ from public theatrics (Carver 464). Fairies are shy presences in their peripheral status; rarely the protagonists of fairy tales, they discreetly creep into stories. In modernist literature, fairies are charged with unspoken feeling. Modernist writers I will discuss include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hope Mirrlees and Sylvia Townsend Warner, while filmmakers and photographers include Percy Stow, Julia Margaret Cameron, and narrative film pioneer Georges Méliès. This doctorate will be rooted in queer and feminist theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Cvetkovich, who creatively re-envision archival practice in terms of the preservation and revelation of queer lives. Fictional creatures have long been deemed peripheral, mirrored in the dismissive rhetoric historically used to trivialise the creativity of women and queer people (Edwards 1). This doctorate will validate the girlish, queer, and quiet, and bring this periphery into focus."