Dr Rachel Bryan, St John's
reb71@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a Fellow, College Associate Lecturer, and Director of Studies in English at St John's College. I was brought up in Durham, where I attended Durham Johnston Comprehensive School. I completed my BA, MPhil, and AHRC-funded PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was a visiting student at Harvard. Before joining St John's, I spent five years as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Research Interests
I work on and teach British and American literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In broad terms, my research focuses on literary responses to war and conflict; I am particularly interested in the role played by literary style in both facilitating the work of consolation and subjecting it to ethical interrogation.
My first monograph, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War (Cambridge: CUP, 2025), examines post-war writings from across the twentieth century which register the role played by consolatory counterfactuals in individual and national responses to mass violence. The book uncovers an under-studied grouping of writers on the borderline between modernist experimentalism and classical realism, and argues that the formal, stylistic, and ethical complexity of their work arises from a sensibility attuned to both the regenerative impulses that accompany violent destruction and the value placed upon consolation and tradition within war-ravaged societies. I am currently working on a number of new research projects. My second monograph, Post-war Guilt and the Literary Imagination, charts British literature’s treatment of those diverse forms of extra-legal war guilt that gripped the world after 1945. I am also co-editing The Other House, Henry James’s 1896 novel of infanticide and collective guilt, for The Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James.
Alongside these book projects, I have written pieces and given talks on topics including Henry James's Rye, literary hoaxes and the First World War, detective fiction, the ethics of counterfactuals, nineteenth-century ideas of pollution and contagion, guilt and literary style, untimely death in nineteenth-century fiction, sacrificial economics in late James, Kazuo Ishiguro's early writing, and the 'Spiritual Ear' in The Golden Bowl.
I began as a Jamesian, and Henry James's work is the focus of a collaborative project I am working on which explores the relationship between scholarship and criticism today. Other writers currently of interest include Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marghanita Laski, Rose Macaulay, Ian McEwan, W. G. Sebald, Gitta Sereny, Nevil Shute, Muriel Spark, and Rebecca West.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I welcome expressions of interest regarding supervision on topics related to my research.
Selected Publications
Books:
Bryan, Rachel, Post-war Guilt and the Literary Imagination (in preparation).
Bryan, Rachel, (editor with Philip Horne), Rediscovering Henry James: Scholarship, Criticism and the Future (in preparation).
Bryan, Rachel, (editor with Greg Zacharias), The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James, Volume Twelve: The Other House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, under contract).
Bryan, Rachel, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009493390
Articles and Book Chapters:
Bryan, Rachel, ‘“Until the Guilt is Everywhere”: W. H. Auden, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Detection in the Age of Area Bombing’, in Golden Age Detection Goes to War, ed. by J.C. Bernthal and Rebecca Mills (forthcoming).
Bryan, Rachel, ‘Henry James and Incompleteness’, Essays in Criticism, 72, 1 (2022), 53-76. https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgac003
Bryan, Rachel, ‘Henry James, George Eliot, and the “Old-fashioned English Novel”’, The Henry James Review, 42, 3 (2021), 192-212. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2021.0023
Bryan, Rachel, ‘Unlived Lives, Imaginary Widowhood and Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love’, The Review of English Studies, 72, 303 (2021), 129-46. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaa043
Bryan, Rachel, ‘“[I]t’s a splendid style, but it’s a dangerous style”: Henry James and Elizabeth Bowen’, in Reading Henry James in the 21st Century: Heritage and Transmission, ed. by Annick Duperray, Adrian Harding, and Dennis Tredy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), pp. 39-49.
Bryan, Rachel, ‘The Return of the “Spiritual Soldier”: Rebecca West’s Henry James’, The Henry James Review, 39, 3 (2018), 256-66. http://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2018.0025
Review Essays and Other Writing:
Bryan, Rachel, ‘VICTORIA STEWART. Literature and Justice in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain: Crimes and War Crimes’, The Review of English Studies, 75, 318 (2024), 121-123. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad102
Bryan, Rachel, ‘BERYL PONG. British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration’, The Review of English Studies, 73, 304 (2021), 415-17. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaa087
Bryan, Rachel, ‘“The Distinguished Thing”: On Henry James’s Centenary’, Jesuan News (Spring 2016), 8.
