Ian Patterson, MA, PhD. Life Fellow in English.
I supervise for both parts of the English Tripos. I teach Practical Criticism, literature from 1870 to the present, dissertations on all sorts of twentieth-century topics, and Part II optional papers in Lyric, Contemporary Writing and Modernism and the Short Story.
My main interest is in modernism, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, especially poetry. I have written on, and have a continuing interest in, poetry in the modernist tradition in Britain and the USA; contemporary fiction; literature and politics in the 1930s and after; literature and war, including pacifism and the Spanish Civil War; little magazines; forgotten writers; translation; psychoanalysis; Proust; and prosody. I'm interested in arguments about literary value, and the historical and cultural conditions of literary production, as well as in historical poetics. My last book, Guernica and Total War examined responses to the new technology of bombing and the cultural construction of fear of death from the air through fiction, poetry, film and political discourse in the period between 1911 and the Cold War. I'm currently working on a new assessment of interactions between writing and left-wing politics between 1929 and 1950, and writing a book which analyses contemporary literary culture through a hostile critique of Ian McEwan's work.
