Popular and Visual Culture

About this Cluster

The interdisciplinary Popular and Visual Culture cluster is headed up by Dr Glyn White. Its membership also comprises Dr Kate Adams, Professor Lucie Armitt, Dr Janice Allan, Dr Peter Buse, Dr Kristin Ewins, Dr Ben Harker and Professor Brian Maidment. Research on popular fiction includes publications on sensation and detective fiction, fantasy and the fantastic, popular women’s writing and the Gothic (Allan and Armitt). Other research in this cluster focuses on popular culture in contemporary film, television and performance (Harker, White and Adams). The cluster also reflects a strong interest in visual culture (including the literary reception of photographic and other illustrations) periodicals, magazines and the popular press (Buse, Ewins and Maidment). Research under this heading thus engages with visual and popular culture across a wide time-span and several different media offering a broad inter-disciplinary umbrella for staff and research students. Projects in progress include Maidment’s editorship of the Victorian volume of the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, White’s co-authored study of film and TV comedy and Armitt’s work on the cinematic sublime and twentieth-century Gothic.

Key Publications

These include:

John Mundy and Glyn White, Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Radio and Television Comedy (forthcoming, Manchester University Press).
Janice M. Allan (ed.), Behaving Badly: a Selection of Sensational Sources (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press).
Brian Maidment, The Life of Dusty Bob: a Cultural History of Dustmen 1790-1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
Glyn White, Reading the Graphic Surface: the Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Lucie Armitt, Fantasy Fiction (New York: Continuum, 2005).