David Barnes

Lecturer in English Literature 

Teaching:
My teaching specialisms are in British and wider anglophone literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. For Univ, I teach Prelims Paper 3, Literature in English 1830-1910.

Research:
My research focuses on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British and American literature. I’m particularly interested in the ways in which political, scientific, and environmental discourses have shaped modern literary history. My first book took the modern history of Venice as a test case for this approach, showing how different forms of civic nationalism and revolutionary politics influenced depictions of this unique city in European and North American literary culture. Subsequent work has explored: 1) the relationship of transatlantic modernist writing to imperialism and conceptions of race, and 2) the place of animals in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and culture. Authors of special interest include: John Ruskin, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. My second book, White Modernities, explores the impact of American hegemony and the New Imperialism on transatla ntic prose and cultural exchange, c.1890-1945. Looking at a range of authors, I show how ‘whiteness’ is simultaneously disseminated and interrogated by transatlantic fiction, considering political moments such as the Spanish-American War of 1898, and ‘indigenismo’ in postcolonial Mexico.
Alongside my academic research outputs, I also write on these topics for a variety of media and have published/broadcast in The Times, Guardian, Literary Hub, Dublin Review of Books and BBC Radio 3.

Publications:
-White Modernities: Transatlantic Writing and New Imperialism (Contract, Oxford University Press)
-The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics (Routledge, 2014)

Articles and Chapters
-‘H.G. Wells’s Urban Beasts’. Cusp: Late Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Cultures 3:1 (2025).
-‘Pleasure and Politics: European and American Writers in Nineteenth-Century Venice’ (German). In Viva Venezia! Die Erfindung Venedigs im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Stella Rollig and -Franz Smola (Cologne: Walther Konig, 2022).
-‘Hemingway’s British Accents’. Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Studies 26:2 (2022).
-‘“Race against Race, Immutable”: Pound’s Fascist Readings of Henry James’. Textual Practice 34:7 (2020).
-‘Mexico, Revolution and Indigenous Politics in D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent’. Modern Fiction Studies 63:4 (2017).
-‘Hemingway, Performance and the Politics of the Corrida de Toros’. Modernist Cultures 11.1 (2016).
-‘Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy’. Journal of Modern Literature 34:1 (2010).
-‘Historicising the Stones: Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Italian Nationalism’. Comparative Literature 62:3 (2010).