Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature

Room: Arts 1.15
Tel: +44 20 7882 8315
Fax: +44 20 8980 5400
email: w.s.mcmorran@qmul.ac.uk

Areas of Specialisation

Comparative Literature. The Early Modern Novel in France and England. The afterlife of early modern literature in contemporary popular culture. The fiction of the Marquis de Sade. Ethical approaches to fiction. Narratology.

Current Research Projects

My immediate research priority, a book entitled Sade, or the Ethics of Fictional Violence, builds on my previous work on eighteenth-century fiction, and on narrative theory. This study examines the reception of Sade in twentieth-century criticism and theory, and the circumstances of his institutionalization as an author of literature. It uses Sade as a test case for the exploration of theoretical questions of authorship and readership, and looks at the experience of reading Sadean fiction to revisit the question of the death of the author, and the controversy that has surrounded the figure of the implied author. It goes on to explore the ethical issues raised by the reading of violent pornography as literature.

The research undertaken for my first book, itself a record of the transnational impact of Cervantes’s novel in the early modern period, has provided ideal preparation for a planned monograph on Don Quixote in Helm Information’s series on Icons Of Modern Culture. My research for this project is currently yielding a series of articles on Quixotic echoes in contemporary French and American cinema which reflect my increasing interest in the interplay between the literary canon and contemporary popular culture, a field of enquiry which is particularly well-suited for comparatist investigation.

Recent Publications

Books

• The Inn and the Traveller: Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Legenda: Oxford, 2002)
• W. McMorran and E. McMorran (eds.), Translation in the Eighteenth Century (SVEC 2001:04)

Articles

• ‘ “I’ve Started so I’ll – ”: Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne’ in Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, ed. Rhian Atkin (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp.64-81.
• ‘Cloud Atlas and If on a winter’s night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel,’ in David Mitchell: Critical Essays, ed. Sarah Dillon (Canterbury: Gylphi Press, 2011), pp.154-74
• ‘Les Visiteurs and the Quixotic Text,’ French Cultural Studies, 19: 2 (2008), pp.159-172.
• ‘Reading and Teaching Sade,’ in A Different Sade: Food for Thought, ed. Marion Hobson (2007), British Academy.
• ‘The Palimpsestic Heroine: Sade’s Justine stories’ in The Flesh in the Text, eds. T. Baldwin, J. Fowler, S. Weller, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.59-78.
• 'Intertextuality and Urtextuality: Sade's Justine Palimpsest,' Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 19:3 (2007), pp.127-141.
• 'Quichottisme et lumières: lectures romanesques de jeunesse (Scarron, Rousseau, Loaisel de Tréogate)' SVEC (2006:12)
• 'From Quijote to Caractacus: Influence, Intertextuality and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' Journal of Popular Culture, 39:5 (2006), pp.756-779.
• 'Descript and the Non-Descript in La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu' in The City in French Writing: The Eighteenth-century Experience (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, February 2004), pp.1-25.
• 'Fielding in France: La Place's Tom Jones', SVEC (2001), pp.285-90.