Mr James Cutler

I am currently a Teaching Fellow in Victorian Literature, having previously worked as a Visiting Tutor in the English and Media Arts departments. This year I am teaching on EN1011: Thinking as a Critic, EN2212: Victorian Literature, EN3515: Special Author: Charles Dickens, and EN5837: The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Contexts, Theories, Readers (on the MA in Victorian Literature Art, and Culture).

My work lies at the intersection between Victorian literature and culture, and studies of adaptation, place, cultural memory, and heritage/ tourism. I am particularly interested in how the Victorians have been received and remembered in post-Victorian culture, and how certain versions of place have come to dominate these memories. 

My research investigates the crucial relationship between place and enduring cultural legacy and popularity in Victorian literary texts. It explores Dickens, the Brontes, and Hardy as the Victorian novelists with the greatest popular legacy. My work examines how legacy and popularity have been catalyzed by certain textual aesthetics of place, and projected imaginary and affective relations to place, both of which are sustained and mythologized by screen adaptation and the heritage industry.