Dr Victoria Stewart

My research interests include the twentieth-century and contemporary novel war writing and life-writing.

My book Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave 2003) considered the work of writers including Vera Brittain Virginia Woolf and Anne Frank from the perspective of trauma theory. Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave 2006) examined a range of novels and short fiction by authors such as Elizabeth Bowen Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton.The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh University Press 2011) explored the use of secrecy as both a trope and a narrative device in fictional treatments of the war. Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age (Cambridge University Press 2017) examines the relationship between true-crime narratives and detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s focusing on the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers Marie Belloc Lowndes and F. Tennyson Jesse. My current book project brings together my interests in crime writing and representations of the aftermath of the Second World War: Crimes and War Crimes: Literature and Justice in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain will be published in the Oxford University Press Mid-Century Studies Series in 2022.

Books
    Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
    The Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
Articles
 'The Criminal Type in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain: Hamilton, Gorse and Heath', Open Library of Humanities Special Collection: Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis 5.1 (2019) 
'Objects, Things and Clues in Early Twentieth-Century Fiction', Modernist Cultures, 14.2 (2019): 172-92
'Crimes and War Crimes: William Hodge & Co and the Public Understanding of the Holocaust in Post-World War II Britain', Law & Literature 31.1 (2019): 113-27
'Glimpsing the Holocaust in post-war British Detective Fiction', Patterns of Prejudice, 53. 1 (2019): 74-85 
'Writing and Reading Diaries in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain', Literature and History 27.1 (2018) 47-61
Book Chapters
' "A Puzzle of Character": Francis Iles and Narratives of Criminality in the 1930s,' in Rex Ferguson, James Purdon and Melissa Littlefield, ed., The Art of Identification: Forensics, Surveillance, Identity (Penn State University Press, 2021): pp. 82-98 
'Old Haunts: Childhood and Home in Postwar Fiction', in Gill Plain ed., British Literature in Transition :1940-1960 Postwar (Cambridge University Press, 2019): pp. 267-81

I've supervised PhDs on representations of the First and Second World War in contemporary fiction the author Clemence Dane and memoirs by early-twentieth-century police detectives. I can potentially supervise projects on:

• Writing from and about the First and Second World Wars
• Holocaust Writing in English Mid 20th-Century Novel
• Non-canonical Authors
• The ‘Middlebrow’
• Detective Fiction.

• Writing from and about the First and Second World Wars
• Holocaust Writing in English Mid 20th-Century Novel
• Non-canonical Authors
• The ‘Middlebrow’
• Detective Fiction

• BA Hons University of Sheffield
• MA University of Leeds
• PhD University of Leeds