My research explores the meeting point between medieval and modernist literary culture in the twentieth-century archive. I am interested both in how medieval texts shape communities of readers and forge identities, and how the material of the medieval past has allowed modernist writers and artists to unearth radical, cross-cultural histories of British and Irish identity. In this work, place and local environment are something shared by medieval and modern literature, a space for negotiating national, regional, religious, and gendered identity. I trace these histories in the modern archive.
My research has focused on late modernists figures including Welsh writers in English like David Jones, Lynette Roberts, and Brenda Chamberlain, the Scottish Makar and Laureate Edwin Morgan, the Irish artists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, and less well-known practitioners and collectors including Nicolete Gray and Helen Sutherland. As a medievalist I have published on the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book, the Old English elegies, The Dream of the Rood, The Life of St. Guthlac and writing associated with King Alfred. I also teach contemporary environmental writing and poetry by poets including Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Nina Mingya Powles and Nancy Campbell.
Some highlights, which you might enjoy exploring to get a sense of my research, are listed here:
- ‘The Haunted Island: Medieval History and the Old English Elegies in Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-race (1962)’, The Review of English Studies – open access article, free to read
- Decomposition/Recomposition: muddy, oozy spaces of estuary, fen, seafloor and tideline, a roundtable for the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community – available to watch on Youtube
- ‘Scrapbooking Old English with Edwin Morgan – “the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush”’, The Glasgow University Library Blog, May 2022
- ‘The Crafting of Sound in the Riddles of the Exeter Book’, in How Riddles Work in the Early Medieval Tradition, eds., Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville (2020) – now in paperback, published 2024!
- ‘“A Deeply Textured Trove of Learning and Reference”: The Gift of David Jones (review of Vision and Memory: The Art of David Jones, Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills)’, Marginalia at the LA Review of Books (2016)
- ‘A Gift for the Illuminated Sphere’, a zine made with Fran Allfrey and Shortlisted for the Creative Response to Modernism Prize, King’s College London
Francesca Brooks 