Christopher McGowan

My academic research focuses on modernism, world literature, and the history of the novel.

My book manuscript, Genre Trouble: The British Modernist Novel, 1900-1945, offers a new account of the relationship between British literature, novelistic genre, and the history of the family under capitalism. If, as many critics have argued, British modernism represents an apparently less radical, “semimodernized modernism” (in comparison, for instance, with American or Irish modernism), Genre Trouble shows that this was the result of a conscious attempt by British writers to salvage the realist tradition and its genre system by developing new, hybrid, “modernist” versions of nineteenth-century genres.

In chapters on the industrial novel, the country-house novel, the travel novel, and the artist novel, I show how modernist writers critically interrogated, repurposed, and recombined nineteenth-century genres and Victorian family plots to reflect and engage the antinomies of the novel in the era of British imperial decline, the apparent massification and globalization of modern western culture, and revolutionary changes in gender relations and family life. In my reading, genre is not only the critic’s tool for understanding the literary tradition, but the way the modernist novel represents that tradition—and attempts to incorporate, reform, break with, or revolutionize it.

My academic writing has appeared in the journals Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Qui Parle, and I have recently completed a book chapter titled, “Film, American Modernism, World Literature,” for a Cambridge companion volume on Film and American Literature.

At Yale, I have taught courses on modernist literature, the twentieth-century novel, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce’s Ulysses, postcolonial and world-systems theory, the politics of climate change, American race and class politics, Marxist cultural theory, and the genre of the artist novel, as well as creative writing courses. I also teach in the Directed Studies program (Literature and History & Politics) and the “Six Global Perspectives” program in Humanities, and in summer programs, including YSS and FSY.

I am a founding member and co-organizer of the Irish Worlds Seminar and the Left Literary Studies working group, and encourage those interested in either group to write to me.

In AY 2025-2026, I served as Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Directed Studies program.

Courses

The European Novel and Empire

W. B. Yeats and his Worlds

Ulysses: Modernist and Postcolonial Epic

ENGL 1014: Colonialism and Climate Crisis

ENGL 1020: Reading and Writing the Modern Essay

ENGL 1014: Postcolonial and World-Systems Theory

Directed Studies: Historical and Political Thought

Directed Studies: Literature

ENGL 1014: Marxism and the Politics of Culture

Six Pretty Good Kids (now Six Global Perspectives program in Humanities)

ENGL 1014: Is America Exceptional?

ENGL 1015: The Artist Novel

Selected Publications

“Conrad,Lawrence, and the Sabotage and Salvage of Genre”; NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56:3 (November 2023), 389-409

“Workers Entering the Prison: Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) as Imperial Labor Film”; Qui Parle 29: 2 (December 2020), 343-372

updated April 2026