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Dr Anne-Marie Beller
Tel: +44 01509 222935
Role: Lecturer in English
Email: A.M.Beller@lboro.ac.uk
Room NN.1.30, Martin Hall Building, East Park
My research is located within the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, with interests in the Victorian novel, particularly popular genres (such as the sensation novel and crime fiction), and women’s writing. Within these areas my work has focused more specifically on gender and sexuality, constructions of literary value, processes of canon formation, and theories of genre.
I have two books forthcoming, both of which centre on the Victorian novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon. My monograph, for Ashgate’s Nineteenth Century Series, examines Braddon's fiction in the light of marginalisation and the Victorian popular woman writer. Drawing on strands of feminist critical thought and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, I assess Braddon's complex positioning within mid and late Victorian literary culture. The second book is a commissioned literary companion to Braddon’s life and work for McFarland. In 2010 I edited Braddon’s novel Henry Dunbar.
I have published articles and chapters on Ellen Wood, M. E. Braddon, Amelia B. Edwards, and Wilkie Collins, and recently contributed two chapters to A Companion to Sensation Fiction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). I have a chapter on sensation in the 1850s in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (CUP) and another essay in a forthcoming collection entitled New Perspectives on Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Rodopi). Current projects include co-editing a special issue of the journal Women’s Writing on female sensation writers and writing a journal article on the collapse of the courtship plot in New Woman fiction. I serve on the committees of MIVSS (Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar) and VPFA (The Victorian Popular Fiction Association) and am a member of the editorial board for the journals Victoriographies and The Wilkie Collins Journal. I am also a member of BAVS (British Association of Victorian Studies) and VSAWC (Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada).
This year I will be convening Women’s Voices and New Woman Writing of the fin de siècle, and teaching on the core modules Modernisms, Critical Studies 1, and Victorian Literature. At postgraduate level I teach on the MA Victorian Pathway. I welcome proposals from potential research students interested in sensation fiction, M. E. Braddon, Ellen Wood, or Wilkie Collins, or more broadly in aspects of gender and sexuality in Victorian literature and culture.