Dr Joseph Anderton
Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature
School of English
- Email:
- joseph.anderton@bcu.ac.uk
Joseph Anderton writes and teaches on modern and contemporary literature, particularly in relation to dehumanisation; animals and the environment; homelessness; and literary ethics.
He is author of Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2016), which considers conceptions of the ‘creature’ and ‘creaturely life’ as they appear in Samuel Beckett’s literature and drama. Joseph is currently writing a new monograph, Writing Homelessness in Contemporary British Literature.
Areas of Expertise
- Modernism
- Post-WWII Literature
- Contemporary Literature
- Literary Animal Studies
- Ecocriticism
- Literature and Ethics
Qualifications
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
- PhD English, University of Nottingham
- MA English Literature, University of Nottingham
- BA(Hons) English with Creative Writing, University of Hull
Teaching
Joseph teaches on twentieth and twenty-first century literature across all undergraduate levels. He also supervises dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Research
Joseph is currently writing a new monograph, Writing Homelessness in Contemporary British Literature. This research focuses fictional and non-fictional accounts of homelessness from 1948 to the present to uncover the shared and differing depictions of home, family, animal companionship, citizenship, poverty, addiction, mental health, and homeless services. It aims to better understand the patterns of literary representation that influence societal perceptions of and responses to homelessness.
Postgraduate Supervision
Joseph welcomes doctoral research proposals on twentieth and twenty-first century literature, particularly:
- Modernist Literature
- Post-WWII Literature
- Literary Animal Studies
- Ecocriticism
- Contemporary Novel
Publications
Monograph
- Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; paperback 2017)
Journal Articles
- ‘Multicultural Literature in a Superdiverse City’, Post 45 Contemporaries, Contemporary Literature from the Classroom, ed. by Rebecca Roach (2024)
- ‘Voices We Don’t Hear About: An Interview with Author Mahsuda Snaith’, C21 Literature, Vol.10, No.2 (August 2023)
- ‘Imagining Homelessness: Ethnofiction in Marc Auge’s No Fixed Abode and Mahsuda Snaith’s How To Find Home’, Alluvium, Vol.9, No.4 (September 2021)
- ‘The Post-Millennial Rise of British Homelessness Literature’, Alluvium, Vol.8, No.3 (November 2020)
- ‘‘Living Flesh’: The Human-Nonhuman Proximity in Beckett’s Four Stories, 1946’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. Samuel Beckett and the Nonhuman, ed. by Douglas Atkinson and Amanda Dennis, Vol. 32, No.2 (Rodopi, October 2020)
- ‘Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett’, Modernism/modernity, Vol.26, No.4 (John Hopkins University Press, November 2019)
- ‘Dogdom: Nonhuman Others and the Othered Self in Kafka, Beckett, and Auster’, Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol.62, No.3 (Hofstra University Press, September 2016)
- ‘“Ceremonious Ape!”: Creaturely Poetics and Anthropomorphic Acts’, Performance Research, ‘On Anthropomorphism’, ed. by Richard Allen and Shaun May, Vol.20, No.2 (Routledge, April 2015)
Book Chapters
- ‘Precarity, Precariousness, Poverty, Homelessness and the Literature and Ethics of Responsiveness’, in: Handbook of Literature and Ethics, ed. by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024)
- ‘Anthony Luvera in conversation with Joseph Anderton’, in: Construct, by Anthony Luvera (GRAIN Projects, 2024)
- ‘Animal Image and Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction’, in: Animals in Detective Fiction, ed. by Ruth Hawthorne and John Miller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
- ‘Revolt against the Anthropos: The Human-Environment Conflicts in D.H. Lawrence’ in: Modernism and the Anthropocene, ed. by Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre (New York: Lexington, 2021)
- ‘“the impulse towards silence”: Creaturely Expressivity in Beckett and Coetzee’, in: Beyond the Human-Animal Divide: Creaturely Lives in Literature and Culture, ed. by Roman Bartosch and Dominik Ohrem (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
- ‘Cyberbeasts: Substitution and Trivialization of the Animal in Social Media, Memes and Video Games’, in: Screening the Non/Human: Representations of Animal Others in the Media, ed. by Joe Leeson-Schatz and Amber George (New York: Lexington, 2016)
- ‘“Hooves!”: The Equine Presence in Beckett’, Beckett and Animals, ed. by Mary Bryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Reviews
- Review: ‘Is It Ok To Laugh about It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture’ by Liat Steir-Livny (Elstree: Vallentine Mitchell, 2017) in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (London: Routledge, 2020)
- Review: ‘Staging Beckett in Great Britain’ ed. by David Tucker and Trish McTighe, (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); ‘Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland’ ed. by David Tucker and Trish McTighe (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and ‘Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America’ by Natka Bianchini (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2015) in: Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
- Review: ‘Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies. New Critical Essays’, ed. by Peter Fifield and David Addyman (London: Methuen Drama, 2013) in: Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
- Review: ‘Why We Laugh: A New Understanding’ by John Charles Simon (Carmel, IN: Starbrook, 2008), in: European Journal of Humour Research, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2014)
Conference Papers/Talks
- ‘Productive Discomfort: Teaching Literary Modernism from Troublesome to Transformative’, Uses of Modernism, Ghent University, 20-22 September 2023
- ‘Frames of Homelessness: Response Ethics and Writing Other Lives in Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards’, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, What Happens Now Conference, 6 and 8 September 2023
- ‘Rethinking Authenticity in Contemporary Homelessness Literature’, Narrating Lives: International Conference on Storytelling, (Auto)Biography and (Auto)Ethnography, London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, 27-28 August 2022
- Guest on BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking: Dogs, 10 November 2021
- ‘Poor Thing: Homeless Animals and their Stories’, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, What Happens Now Virtual Conference, 3 September 2021
- ‘Crises in Times of Crisis: Homelessness and Discourses of Pathology’, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, Crisis in Contemporary Literature Virtual Conference, 26 June 2020
- ‘Imagining Precarity: The Language and Utility of Contemporary Homelessness Fiction’, Precarious Lives, Uncertain Futures Conference, University of Rome, 29-31 January 2020
- ‘Samuel Beckett and the Human-Nonhuman Proximity, 1946-1951’, The Annual Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School, University of Vienna, 1-5 July 2019
- ‘Beckett, Vegetating Life and Late Modernism’, Mid-century Modernism Research Seminar and MA Masterclass, University of Sheffield, 1 May 2019
- ‘‘Living Flesh’: The Human-Nonhuman Proximity in Beckett’s Four Nouvelles’, Beckett and the Nonhuman Conference, Free University of Brussels, 7-8 February 2019
- ‘Regarding Homelessness: Berger’s King: A Street Story and McGregor’s Even The Dogs’, British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies, What Happens Now Conference, Loughborough University, 10-12 July 2018
- ‘Wildlife and Literature’ Public Lecture, The Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country, Hilton Garden Inn, Birmingham, 23 May 2018
- ‘‘No Ideal Vegetation’: Unfinished Life in Kafka and Beckett’, British Association for Modernist Studies, Modernist Life International Conference, University of Birmingham, 29 June-1 July 2017
- ‘Samuel Beckett’s “highly successful failures”’, ‘Towards an Aesthetics of Failure’ Special Session, Modern Language Association Annual International Conference 2016, Austin, Texas, 8-11 January 2016
- ‘Something Novel in the Nothing New: Talawa’s Waiting for Godot and Amateur Theatre in the Midlands’, Staging Beckett at the Margins Conference, University of Chester, 11-12 September 2014
- ‘Dogdom: The Unknowable World of Canines in Kafka, Beckett and Auster’, Reading Animals International Conference, University of Sheffield, 17-20 July 2014
- ‘Beckett’s Late Modernism and the Creature’ British Association for Modernist Studies, Modernism Now! International Conference, University of London, 26-28 June 2014
- ‘“stop talking and do something for a change”: Beckett’s Not I and Happy Days’, A Beckett Evening, The Lace Market Theatre, Nottingham, 21 May 2014