Dr Harry Acton

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 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

Teaching

Teaching modules

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

Publications