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Dr Harry Acton

  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    I am a critic and fiction writer.

     My research interests include:

    •  The experiential and ethical dimensions of reading, and their implications for critical practice.
    •  The relations between reading, critical aesthetics and literary innovation.
    •  Ecocriticism, especially fiction’s potential to shape a non-anthropocentric ethics.

    Highlights

    • 'Anthropocene Aesthetics in D.H. Lawrence's New World Fictions', Reading D.H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene, ed. by Terry Gifford (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024). 

    • 'Reading the Nonhuman in D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and Women in Love', D.H. Lawrence Review Vol. 44, No.2 (2022), 88-109. 

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • The experiential and ethical dimensions of reading, and their implications for critical practice.
    • The relations between reading, critical aesthetics and literary innovation
    • Ecocriticism, especially fiction’s potential to shape a non-anthropocentric ethics

    Research overview

    My PhD research, which I am developing as a monograph entitled Reading Feeling: The Embodied Reader in D.H. Lawrence’s Criticism and Fiction, explores the relation between Lawrence’s omnivorous, lifelong habits of autodidactic reading and his developing modernist critical and fictional practice. 

    I am also completing a novel that explores, in the form of a near-future fictional memoir, the unfolding, incalculable effects of ecological breakdown in rural Britain. 

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • Writing the Planet (AREN292S7)
    • Contemporary Writing 2: Genre (ENHU041S7)
  • Publications

    Publications

    Article