Dr Emily Horton
Senior Lecturer

Research area(s)

• 20th and 21st Century Anglophone World Literature
• 20th and 21st Century British Literature
• Trauma and Affect Theory
• Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and Diasporic Literature
• The Gothic Tradition (19th-21st Century)
• Spatial Theory
• Queer Writing

Research Interests

Emily's research reflects her interest in the connections between contemporary literature and recent critical theory examining representations of trauma and affect as a means to contemplating alternative modes of socio-political belonging. 

Emily's monograph, Contemporary Crisis Fictions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), focuing on the writing of Graham Swift, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, explores a newly emergent genre of literary fiction concerned to negotiate the crises impelled by neoliberal power. Rejecting popular postmodern and metafictional readings in favour of a combined historical materialist and affect theory approach, she reads these texts as instigating new modes of critical cosmopolitan thinking, which both reflect and respond to the cultural ambiguities of the contemporary period.

Her edited collection on The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014), co-edited with Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson, offers a comprehensive re-reading of 1980s British fiction from a post-millennial, world-oriented perspective, incorporating new critical theory to reconsider issues of form, genre, style and to animate new discussion regarding the nature of contemporary literary creativity, experiment, and reading practice from the 1980s on-wards. 

Her edited collection on Ali Smith (Bloomsbury, 2013), co-edited with Monica Germanà, explores Smith’s fiction with respect to a number of critically prescient themes, including contemporary feminism and queer theory, consumer space and ‘non-place’, spectral time and temporality, Scottish devolution, the contemporary publishing industry, and recent developments in deconstructive and cosmopolitan narrative ethics. 

More broadly, Emily's publications mirror her concern with late twentieth and early twenty-first century literature’s on-going encounter with socio-political struggle, often in relation to the crises impelled by globalisation.