Staff profiles
Dr Mary Grover
Phone 0114 225 4003
E-mail m.grover@shu.ac.uk
Research interests / current work
Literature from the 1920s and 1930s with special consideration of the ways in which literary tastes are mediated and devalued. My examinations of the ways cultural hierarchies were formed and negotiated during this period are informed by Pierre Bourdieu's writings on the sociology of taste. Areas of specialism include the work of writers dismissed as 'middlebrow', the cultural critique of Q. D. Leavis, the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward and cultural transmission in interwar Calcutta.
I have instigated and co-organised the following conferences
- Investigating the middlebrow, Sheffield Hallam University (2007)
- Historicising the middlebrow, Sheffield University (2008)
- Middlebrow culture, Strathclyde University (2009)
- The Masculine middlebrow, London University (2009)
I have also given papers and organised panels on behalf of the network at a number of conferences including the North American Conference of British Studies, Boston 2006 and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Toronto, 2009.
I am currently establishing, for Sheffield Hallam University, a special collection of popular fiction entitled 'Readerships and literary cultures, 1880-1950'. I aim to encourage research into the range of popular fiction at this period and to involve the local non-academic community with research activities in this area.
Research outputs since 2004
The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping - Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment (AUP, 2009)
'The view from the middle: Godden and her Literary Landscape', Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller edited by Lucy LeGuicher and Phyllis Lassner (Ashgate, 2010)
Research collaborations
Entries on, Ethel M Dell, O. Douglas, Q. D. Leavis, Ethel Mannin, Margery Sharp and Angela Thirkell in Faye Hamill et al (eds.), Encyclopedia of British Women Authors, 1900-1950 (Palgrave, 2006)
'The Thirties Now': co-editor with Chris Hopkins of this edition of Working Papers on the Web (April 2004)
