Dr Darryl Jones BA (York), DPhil (York), F.T.C.D.
Head of the School of English
Senior Lecturer
My major research and teaching interest is in the general area of popular literature, particularly in the fields of horror fiction and film, and of Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. Most specifically, I am interested in writers such as M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, and their contemporaries in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century popular literature.
My work tends to focus largely (though not exclusively) on British writing, and I’m currently writing a long study of twentieth-century British horror fiction and film (writers such as M. R. James, Robert Aickman, Dennis Wheatley, James Herbert, and others; films such as The Old Dark House, Dead of Night, Night of the Demon, the Wicker Man, and the output of Hammer Studios). I’m also working on a long-term project on mass death and catastrophe fiction since the Enlightenment, which so far has resulted in articles on H. G. Wells, on the Christian Right Left Behind series of bestselling apocalyptic thrillers, on The Turner Diaries and other American neo-Nazi novels, and on the Decline and Fall of the American Empire.
I have a long-standing teaching and research interest in the nineteenth-century novel, and most particularly the work of Jane Austen, on whom I published a monograph in 2004.
As a native speaker of Welsh, I also find myself making occasional interventions in the subjects of Welsh culture and literature. My most recent research has been on nineteenth-century Hollow Earth novels, on British ghost stories, on Night of the Demon, and on The Exorcist.
I have supervised numerous PhDs in the general area of popular literary studies. Current and recent PhD topics have included:
- Menstruation and female blood in horror fiction and film.
- The cultural representation of the serial killer.
- Jane Austen and national identity.
- Postmodern vampires.
- Haunted space in American horror.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs.
- Post-apocalyptic novels.
- Fin-de-siècle invasion narratives.
- The figure of the superman, from Nietzsche to Clark Kent.
- 1950s nuclear novels.
- Overpopulation in nineteenth-century fiction.
- Beast-men in the nineteenth-century novel.
Publications:
Books:
Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy, eds. It Came from the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
M. R. James, Collected Stories, edited with an introduction by Darryl Jones, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010.
Studying Poetry. Second edition, revised and expanded. London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming [with Stephen Matterson].
Reinterpreting Emmet: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet, ed. Anne Dolan, Patrick Geoghegan and Darryl Jones, Dublin: UCD Press, 2007. 258pp.
Jane Austen. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 252pp.
Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold; and New York: OUP, 2002. 220pp.
Studying Poetry. London: Arnold; and New York: OUP, 2000, repr. 2001. 188pp. [with Stephen Matterson]
Articles:
‘“It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!”: Night of the Demon and the British 1950s’, in preparation for Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy, eds. It Came from the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties
‘Ultima Thule: Arthur Gordon Pym and the Hollow Earth’, Edgar Allan Poe Review (forthcoming 2010).
‘Robert Aickman, the Ghost Story, and the Idea of Englishness’, in Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stephens, eds. A Ghostly Genre: Short Fiction and the Supernatural (Dublin: Four Courts, forthcoming 2010)
‘Horror’, in M. Keith Booker, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).
‘Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror’, Irish Universities Review, 17:1 (2009), pp. 31-44.
‘H.G. Wells and the Imagination of Disaster’, in Philip Coleman, ed. On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), pp. 129-47.
‘Hunters and Patriots: The Fiction of the American Neo-Nazi Movement’, in Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, eds. Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), pp. 103-122.
‘Scenes from the Decline and Fall of the American Empire’, Forum, 5 (2007), pp. 1-15.
‘The Liberal Antichrist: Left Behind in America’, in Crawford Gribben and Kenneth Newport, eds. Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006, pp. 97-112.
‘King of the Castle: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King’, in Bernice Murphy, ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2005, pp. 214-36 [with Dara Downey].
‘“Distorted Nature in a Fever”: Irish Bulls, Irish Novels, the 1798 Rebellion, and their Gothic Contexts’, in Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, eds. ‘An Uncomfortable Authority’: Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004, pp. 127-44.
‘Radical Ambivalence: Frances Burney, Jacobinism, and the Politics of Romantic Fiction’, Women’s Writing 10 :1 (2003), pp. 3-26.
‘“A Fancy Name in that Incestuous Context”: Dannie Abse Writing About Wales’, Poetry Ireland Review, 62 (Autumn 1999), pp. 79-83.
Contributor to Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed. The Handbook of Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
‘I Failed Utterly : Saunders Lewis and the Cultural Politics of Welsh Modernism’, The Irish Review, 19 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp. 22-43.
‘Celtic Nationalism and Postcolonial Theory’, SPAN, 41 (October 1995), pp. 28-36.
‘Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies : Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s’, Literature and History 4 :2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 1-24.
Contact:
Dr Darryl Jones
Room 4013
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
drjones@tcd.ie