Dr Rachel Bryan, St John's

reb71@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a Fellow, College Assistant Professor, 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. My current research comprises three projects centred around works that challenge or reimagine legal personhood through their treatment of beings denied the recognition, protections, and dignity instilled by this rights-bearing fiction: those suffering from collective or inherited guilt, missing and stateless people, rivers and eco-systems. The first is co-editing The Other House, Henry James’s 1896 novel of infanticide and collective guilt, for The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James. A second monograph project, Postwar Guilt and the Literary Imagination, aims to reveal the hold that diverse forms of war guilt exerted on mid-century judicial and literary landscapes; it also suggests that debates between legal and extra-legal formulations of culpability contributed to the widespread “return to realism” after 1945. I am working concurrently on a third book, Vanishing Acts: Literature and More-Than-Legal Personhood. The project draws on methodologies from eco-criticism and the interdisciplinary field of literature and human rights to explore how literary texts attempt to answer the question “What is a person?”

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, ‘Henry James, Jr.: Introduction’, in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Publishing, under contract).

Bryan, Rachel, ‘Free Speech’, in George Orwell in Context, ed. by Nathan Waddell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 

Bryan, Rachel, 'Lost Children and Postwar Realism', ELH (forthcoming, 2026). 

Bryan, Rachel, ‘“Until the Guilt is Everywhere”: W. H. Auden, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Detection in the Age of Area Bombing’, in Anglophone Golden Age Detective Fiction and the World Wars, ed. by J.C. Bernthal and Rebecca Mills (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 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.