Chris Ewers
Department: English and Film
Discipline: English
Research Centre/Unit: Eighteenth-Century Literature
Project Summary
I am involved in two strands of research at the moment; the changing temporalities of fiction between 1750-1820, and the narratives of sport (asking what do novels and poems do differently to other media such as TV, films and newspapers in representing sport).
I have written a monograph, Mobility in the English Novel from Defoe to Austen (Boydell and Brewer 2018), and a book chapter on Sir John Hill's work as a columnist, 'The Inspector at Large: Investigating the Spaces of London', in Fame and Fortune: Sir John Hill and London Life in the 1750s (Palgrave 2017). I have written journal articles on Robert Bage's Hermsprong and its importance as an early example of the regional novel, the complexity of Sir Walter Scott's spatial imagination in Waverley, and the way different types of train journey shape Agatha Christie's detective fiction.
My research on sport has led to the introduction of a third-year module on Sport, Literature and Media, looking at texts from David Peace's Damned Utd to Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.
Wider Research Interests
The novel in the long eighteenth century, particularly Fielding, Sterne and Austen; mobilities and modes of transport; how narrative is altered by changing perceptions of time and space; the sports novel; post-apocalyptic fiction; the relation between newspaper design and journalism; ekphrastic poetry.
