Christopher McGowan

My academic work focuses on world anglophone literature, modernism, and the history of the novel. My first book project, “Inherited Worlds,” offers a new account of the relationship between modernism, genre, the end of the British empire, and the history of the family under capitalism. The development of British modernism, I argue, can best be told as a story of the sabotage and salvage of genre: as an extended and agonized, but also opportunistic and triumphant restructuring of the nineteenth-century genre system. At Yale, I have taught courses on American politics, Marxism and culture, and the artist novel, as well as creative writing courses. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Qui Parle and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.