Biography

Bran Nicol is Professor of English Literature. He joined the University of Surrey in 2012 having previously been Director of the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Bran works on post-war fiction, contemporary culture, and crime fiction and film. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (2009), Stalking (2006), and the forthcoming The Private Eye: Detectives in Film (2013).

Research Interests

Post-war British and American Fiction
Postmodernism
Psychoanalytic Theory
Film Studies
Crime fiction and film

Publications

Books

The Private Eye: Detectives in Film (Reaktion Books: forthcoming, 2013)

Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2010; co-edited with Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty).

The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2009). pp. 240.

Stalking (Reaktion Books, 2006). pp.160. [Translated into Italian (2009; Turin: Ananke), Korean (2009; Seoul: In Gan Sa Rang), Japanese (2013; Tokyo: Sogensha)]

D. M. Thomas (Writers and their Work series, British Council/Northcote House, 2004). pp.128

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (Ed.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2002). pp.480

Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction (Macmillan, 1999). [2^nd edition, Palgrave, 2004, including new preface, postscript and 2 new chapters] pp.248

Journal Articles

‘Detective Fiction and “the Original Crime”: Baudrillard, Calle, Poe’, Cultural Politics, 7:3 Special Issue: Baudrillard Redux, November 2011. pp.445-464.

‘Iris Murdoch and the Aesthetics of Masochism’, Journal of Modern Literature, 29:2, 2006. pp.148-65.

‘Philosophy’s Dangerous Pupil: Murdoch and Derrida’, Modern Fiction Studies (Special Issue on Iris Murdoch), 47:3, Fall 2001. pp.580-601.

‘As If: Traversing the Fantasy in Žižek’, Paragraph (Special Issue on Žižek), 24:2, 2001. pp.140-55.

‘Normality and Other Kinds of Madness: Žižek and the Traumatic Core of the Subject’, Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, March 2000. pp.7-20.

‘Reading Paranoia: Paranoia, Epistemophilia, and the Postmodern Crisis of Interpretation’, Literature and Psychology, 45, 1&2, 1999. pp.44-62.

‘Anticipating Retrospection: The First-Person Retrospective Novel and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea’, The Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 26, no. 2, Spring 1996. pp.187-208.

Reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 171, February 2006.

Book Chapters

'Poe's Urban Environment'. In Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Poe in Context, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming, 2012).

‘In the Private Eye: The Space of Noir’. In Vivian Miller and Helen Oakley, eds., Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions. Palgrave Crime Files Series (forthcoming, 2012). 6000 words

‘Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0’. In Sabine Vanacker & Catherine Wynne, eds., The Cultural Afterlives of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle: Representations Across the Media, Palgrave Crime Files Series (forthcoming, 2013). 8000 words

‘Police Thy Neighbour: Crime Culture and the Rear Window Paradigm’. In Nicol, Pulham and McNulty, eds., Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2010). 192-209

‘Reading Spark in the Age of Suspicion’. In David Herman, ed., Muriel Spark: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press/Modern Fiction Studies, 2010. pp.112-128.

‘Murdoch’s Mannered Realism: Metafiction, Morality and the Post-War Novel’. In Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., Iris Murdoch and Morality. London: Palgrave, 2010.

‘Patricia Highsmith’. In Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.

‘Iris Murdoch’. The Oxford Encyclopaedia of British Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

‘The Curse of the Bell: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Narrative’. In Anne Rowe, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. London: Palgrave, 2006.

‘Postmodernism’. In David Bradshaw and Kevin J. Dettmar, eds., A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. pp.565-70.

‘“The Memoir as Self-Destruction”: Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis’. In Jo Gill, ed., Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. London & New York: Routledge, 2005. pp.100-114.

‘The Flâneur and the Stalker’. In Eileen Kennedy and Andrew Thornton, eds., Leisure, Media and Visual Culture: Representations and Contestations, Leisure Studies Association, vol. 83, pp.61-71.

Departmental Duties

Programme Director, MA in English Literature