Matthew Levay

Biography

My research and teaching focus on twentieth-century British literature and culture, with emphases in modernism, the history and theory of the novel, literary genres, and popular print culture. I am currently preparing my first book manuscript, “Violent Minds: Modernism and the Life of Crime,” which constructs a genealogy of criminality in modernist fiction from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s. Examining a range of modernist authors who explored new modes of psychological representation through the figure of the criminal, and who drew upon works of criminal anthropology, detective fiction, and journalistic accounts of crime and violence in order to develop those representations, “Violent Minds” demonstrates how a cultural fascination with criminality helped to establish modernist theories of subjectivity and narrative form. I have also begun researching a new project on modernism and the novel series, tentatively entitled “Serial Modernism: Twentieth-Century British Fiction and the Form of the Sequel.” This book aims to show how and why novel series have played an underappreciated yet pivotal role in shaping modernist aesthetics, and how experimentation with serial forms allowed authors to complicate their readers' experiences of narrative time, characterization, and plot. As these projects indicate, my interest in popular culture complements my work in modernism. Specifically, I am interested in genre fictions, comics, and periodicals that explicitly or implicitly blur the lines between popular and experimental form, and in how those works complicate our understanding of cultural capital, aesthetic value, and generic definition. An article on the early history of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine is forthcoming in a collection on crime fiction in American culture, and I am also editing a special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies on “Seriality.” Finally, I continue to write about comics and graphic narrative, and am currently completing an essay on repetition and narrative temporality in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy strips, as well as a set of articles on anachronism in the comics of Al Columbia and Seth. My research in these areas also informs my teaching, which, from introductory literature courses to advanced graduate seminars, emphasizes formalist and historicist criticism. Likewise, I am committed to teaching neglected texts alongside canonical works, and to highlighting the value of academic writing as a vehicle for intellectual engagement and expression.

Research Interest

British literature and culture