Selected Publications
Pacific
Rim Modernisms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009 Co-edited
with Helen Sword and Steven Yao
The Pacific Rim is a geographical region made up of all areas bordered by the Pacific Ocean, its span reaching countries as diverse as the Canada, Korea, China, Mexico, and Australia. Tracing vectors of appropriation, migration, and exchange, Pacific Rim Modernisms explores the complex ways that writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Pacific Rim have contributed to modernist culture, literature, and identity.
Appropriately, given their wide geographical and temporal sweep, the fourteen essays gathered in this volume reflect a range of scholarly perspectives and methodologies, expressing varied viewpoints, divergent voices, and even contradictory definitions of Modernism itself. By placing geographical rather than political boundaries at the centre of academic inquiry, Pacific Rim Modernisms seeks not only to redraw old boundaries but to open up the modernist landscape to new mappings and new debates.
The Professional Literary Agent in Britain: 1880-1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007
The Professional Literary Agent in Britain: 1880-1920 breaks new ground in its study of British literary culture during an important transitional period. The book, like other recent studies, operates from the central premise that the business of authorship is inextricably enmeshed with the aesthetics of literary praxis. But rather than providing a broad overview of the period, it focuses on a specific figure, the professional literary agent, whose emergence in about 1880 coincided with, and accelerated, the transformation of both publishing and authorship. The book traces the influence of two prominent agents - A. P. Watt (generally acknowledged as the first professional literary agent) and J. B. Pinker (the leading figure in what has been termed the second wave of agenting) - focusing on their relationships with two key clients each - George MacDonald and Lucas Malet for Watt; Somerville & Ross and Joseph Conrad for Pinker. These case studies provide the foundation for both the theoretical models developed in the book to explain the business dynamics operating in the literary world at this time and for the shifting definition of literature itself that is a central aesthetic concern of the period.
Modernist Literature: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Co-written with Aurelea Mahood
This engaging textbook provides a critical assessment of British literature produced between 1900 and 1945.
The book adopts a unique structure in which individual chapters focus on a single decade, a distinct genre and a specific theme: the 1900s - the short story - gender and sexuality; the 1910s - poetry - war, technology and propaganda; the 1920s - the novel - new modes of literary expression; the 1930s - the documentary - political engagement. A final chapter covers the 1940s and beyond looking at new literary and artistic movements and ‘other’ modernisms. Covering key canonical texts as well as lesser-known works, Modernist Literature introduces students and general readers to a diverse range of literature in its historical and aesthetic contexts and to current debates in this ever-evolving field of study.
Features
• Examines four distinct genres: the short story, poetry, novel and documentary using a decade-by-decade structure.
• Combines close readings with cultural and political analyses of British modernism.
• Analyses canonical and lesser-known texts from the opening decades of the twentieth century.
• Includes a Chronology and Further Readings with each chapter.
Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996
In a challenging re-examination of the origins of British modernism, Mary Ann Gillies shows that French philosopher Henri Bergson played a central role in the development of British literary modernism. While Bergson's influence on modernism has long been debated, this is the first thorough, current examination of the ways in which his ideas are manifest in British modernism.
Focusing on the work of T.E. Hulme, the Men of 1914, the Bloomsbury Group, T.S. Eliot, and John Middleton Murry, Gillies convincingly demonstrates that Bergson's theories underlie the literary aesthetics of the period that forms the intellectual basis of modern literature. She then turns her critical eye to five major modernist writers - T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and Joseph Conrad - and provides insightful and detailed Bergsonian readings of their major works.
Drawing on material not previously available, Gillies persuasively argues that Bergson was a major intellectual force in British literature during the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
