Professor Allan Johnson
About
Biography
My research focuses on the psychoanalytic implications of narrative absence and elision (i.e., the unsaid and unspeakable) in twentieth-century literature to demonstrate how these textual gaps reveal the complex entanglement of subjectivity and narrative form. I am the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2022), and numerous articles and chapters on literary modernism.
I am the former editor of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism. I served as Associate Dean (Doctoral College) for the Faculty of Arts, Business, and Social Sciences from 2019 to 2025, where I supported doctoral researchers and worked to foster an environment that encouraged academic excellence and interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly through my involvement with AHRC and ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership leadership.
I welcome PhD proposals that engage with modernist literature, particularly projects that explore its intersections with contemplative studies, philosophy of mind, and esotericism.
Areas of specialism
My qualifications
Previous roles
Affiliations and memberships
News
In the media
ResearchResearch interests
My most recent work examines the influence of esoteric and occult thought on modernist aesthetics and innovation, demonstrating how mystical philosophical traditions shaped creative experimentation during the twentieth century. The book emerging from this research, The Sacred life of Modernist Literature, explores the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several important strands of occult practice that emerged in Europe between 1894 and 1944, leading to critical developments in psychoanalysis and the reconstitution of mythographic psychotherapies that codified earlier forms of Hermetic and Neoplatonic mysticism.
I welcome PhD proposals that engage with modernist literature, particularly projects that explore its intersections with contemplative studies, philosophy of mind, and esotericism.
Research interests
My most recent work examines the influence of esoteric and occult thought on modernist aesthetics and innovation, demonstrating how mystical philosophical traditions shaped creative experimentation during the twentieth century. The book emerging from this research, The Sacred life of Modernist Literature, explores the relationship between modernist literary experimentation and several important strands of occult practice that emerged in Europe between 1894 and 1944, leading to critical developments in psychoanalysis and the reconstitution of mythographic psychotherapies that codified earlier forms of Hermetic and Neoplatonic mysticism.
I welcome PhD proposals that engage with modernist literature, particularly projects that explore its intersections with contemplative studies, philosophy of mind, and esotericism.
Supervision
Completed postgraduate research projects I have supervised
- [in progress] PhD, Megan Williams (AHRC funded), ‘“Priceless Gems of Living Thought”: Anarchism and Aestheticism at the Fin de Siècle’
- [in progress] PhD, Andrea Marzocchi, ‘‘I am nothing; I see all.’ The Sublime and the (De)construction of Cultural Identities in Contemporary American Short Stories’
- [in progress] PhD, Sarer Scotthorne, ‘Little Thought Way: How Can the Mindfulness Practice of Martial Arts Transform Creative Process?’ (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Sue Terry, ‘Enchanted Modernism and the Radical Reform of the Interwar Family: Female Empowerment in the Magical Modernist Fiction of Five British Women Writers, 1900- 1940’
- PhD, Beth Roberts, ‘Feminist Pluralities in 21st-Century American Historiographic Metadrama’ (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Julian Woolford, ‘“Attend The Tale”: Adaptation, Structure and Storytelling in Musical Theatre’
- PhD, John Attridge, ‘Playing the Outsider: Re-evaluating Modernism and Working-Class Representation in E. M. Forster’
- PhD, Hajar Mahfoodh, ‘Resistance, Home and Exile in Modern Arab Poery’
- PhD, Toby Jungius, ‘How Traditional Associations between the Uncanny and Stop-motion are Challenged by the Delineation of the Familiar and the Unfamiliar (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Georgia van Raalte (AHRC funded), ‘Dion Fortune’s Occult Novels and the Techniques of Literary Initiation’
- PhD, Enaiê Schlogel De Azambuja (AHRC funded) ‘Cosmological Imaginations: Zen and Material Ecopoetics in Williams, Moore, Stevens, and Cummings’
- PhD, Michelle Rushefsky, ‘Horror Capriccios: (Re)Imagining British Nineteenth-Century Fiction through the Veil of American Horror’ (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Stewart Ferris, ‘Jeeves and Wooster: Style, Origins, and Influences’ (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Gianni Washington, ‘Janus: The Monstrosity of Genre’ (co-supervisor)
- PhD, Katrina Marshall, ‘Five Get Into Gender Trouble: A Study of Gender Controversy in the Famous Five Revised Editions’
- PhD, Christopher Hill, ‘Music Figures, Inspiration and the Performance of Identity in the Contemporary Transnational Novel’
- PhD, Stephanie Han, ‘Writing Beyond the Nation: Globality, Aesthetics, and the Asian American Novel’ (co-supervisor)
Teaching
My teaching spans modernist literature, twentieth-century cultural history, and interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities. I lead modules on Modernism, The American Century, and Magic, Mysticism, and Modernity, all of which reflect my ongoing research in modernist studies. I also contribute to various undergraduate modules.
Publications
Highlights
- The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022; softcover 2024).
- Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature: Castration, Narration, and a Sense of the Beginning, 1919-1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; softcover 2019).
- Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; softcover 2016).
- ‘Contingency and the Categorical Imperative in Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
- ‘Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending”’, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, (2024) 37:1.
- ‘“A little bit naughty”: The Logotherapeutic Process in Tim Minchin’s Matilda the Musical’, Studies in Musical Theatre, (2023) 17:2, 95-105.
- ‘Intermodernism and the Ethics of Being Late in Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton’, English Studies, (2023) 104:1, 120-133.
- ‘The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy’, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion, eds. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
- ‘Bernard Shaw’s Gnostic Genius’, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, (2021) 20:2, 35-49.
- ‘The Multiple Mobilities of Civil Rights in Jeanine Tesori’s Violet and Caroline, or Change’, Studies in Musical Theatre, (2020), 14:3, 243-543.
- ‘Decadence in the Time of AIDS’, Decadence: A Literary History, ed. Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
- With Didi Udofia, ‘Using Mindfulness Meditation Techniques to Support Peer-to-Peer Dialogue in Seminars’, Enhancing Student-Centred Teaching Through Student-Staff Partnerships, eds Karen Gravett, Nadya Yakovchuk, and Ian Kinchin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
- ‘“[God] is a flaming Hebrew letter’: Esoteric Camp in Angels in America’, Literature and Theology (2019), 33:2, 206-222.
- ‘“A gay story, a history”: Gay Male Liberation and Queer Rumination’, Accelerated Times, Volume 5: British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000, eds Berthold Schoene and Eileen Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- With Aren Roukema, ‘Time to Drop the “Western”’, Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism (2018), 6:2, 109-115.
- ‘The Pleasure of Conspicuous Leisure in Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth’, English Studies, (2017) 98:8, 968-977.
- ‘T.S. Eliot and the Modernist Thunderbolt’, The Startling New, ed. Mary Pat Brady (Detroit: Gale, 2017).
- ‘Architectural Space and the Failures of ‘Complete’ Houses in Heartbreak House’, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, (2016) 36:2, 203-14.
- ‘“The doors would be taken off their hinges”: Space, Place, and Architectural Absence in Virginia Woolf’, English Studies, (2016) 97:4, 412-419.
- ‘Designing “Authenticity” in Digital Learning Environments’, Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, (2016) 9.
- ‘Thresholds of Interpretation: Identifying, Producing, and Supporting with The Turn of the Screw’ CEA Critic (Journal of the College English Association) (2015) 77.2, 196-210.
- ‘The Authentic and Artificial Histories of Mechanical Reproduction in Doctorow’s Ragtime’, Orbis Litterarum, (2015) 72:2, 89-107.
- ‘It’s Vestimentary, My Dear Watson: Fashion, Disguise, and Criminality in Sherlock’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, (2014) 4:2, 115-127.
- ‘Buried Temples and Open Planes: Alethea Hayter, Alan Hollinghurst, and the Architecture of Drug-Taking’, Textual Practice, (2013), 27:7, 1177-1195.
- Review of Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, in Notes and Queries, (2011), 58:3.
- ‘Artistic Excision and Scientific Production in Cather’s The Professor’s House’, The Explicator, (2010), 68:2.
- Review of Madelyn Detloff, The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century, in Notes and Queries, (2010), 57:2.
- ‘Voices and Language in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’, T.S. Eliot, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2009).
- ‘Ambrose Silk, The Yellow Book, and The Ivory Tower: Influence and Jamesian Aesthetics in Put Out More Flags’, Evelyn Waugh Studies, (2009), 40:2.
- ‘Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Dracula, ed. Jack Lynch (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2009).
- Review of Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870- 1914, in Notes and Queries, (2009), 56:1.
- ‘“You are not, not, not to look at your Baedeker”: Renovation of Space and the Mediating Presence of Baedeker’s Northern Italy in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View’, Origins of English Literary Modernism, 1870-1914. ed. by Gregory Tague (Palo Alto, CA.: Academica, 2008).
- Review of Ferdinand Saumarez Smith, Eleusis and Enlightenment: The Problem of the Mysteries in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Journal of Religious History.