Affective Experience Lab lead Dr Fraser Riddell recently published an edited collection of essays on the early twentieth-century writer Charlotte Mew. Mew’s works are distinguished by their concern with the fragility and intensity of the material body, the social dynamics of disability and the stigma of mental illness. Charlotte Mew: Poetics, Bodies, Ecologies represents the first volume dedicated solely to critical engagement with the full range of Mew’s poetry, fiction and essays. The volume draws together literary scholars working across the fields of poetry and poetics, decadence, modernism, ecocriticism and queer theory, while illustrating the particular stylistic and thematic complexities of Mew’s writing.
Of particular interest to scholars of affect, the senses and the medical humanities will be Frankie Dytor’s ‘Charlotte Mew and the Unspeakable Sites of Trans Embodiment’ and Ryan McNab’s Nature and the Lyric Self in the Work of Charlotte Mew’. McNab’s chapter builds on his outstanding recent PhD thesis: ‘Selfhood, Rurality, and the Sensorial Body in the Age of British Modernism, 1915-1945’.
The collection is co-edited by Dr Megan Girdwood (a member of the Moving Bodies Lab) and Dr Francesa Bratton, author of Stronger than Death: Hart Crane’s Last Year in Mexico.
Building on this exploration of the complex embodied and emotional dynamics of poetic language, the Affective Experience Lab will host a one-day interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Love-Hate Relating: Analysing Ambivalence’ in May 2025. To register your interest, please email the Lab team.
