Dr Harry Acton

Overview

Biography

I am a critic and fiction writer.

 My research interests include:

•  The experiential and ethical dimensions of reading, and their implications for critical practice.
•  The relations between reading, critical aesthetics and literary innovation.
•  Ecocriticism, especially fiction’s potential to shape a non-anthropocentric ethics.

Highlights

• The Embodied Reader in D.H. Lawrence's Criticism and Fiction: Reading, Feeling and Narrative Form (under contract with Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2025).

• 'Reading the Nonhuman in D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and Women in Love', D.H. Lawrence Review Vol. 44, No.2 (2019), 88-109. 

• 'Anthropocene Aesthetics in D.H. Lawrence's Later Fiction', in Reading D.H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene, ed. by Terry Gifford (under contract with Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2024/5). 

Research

Research interests

• The experiential and ethical dimensions of reading, and their implications for critical practice.
• The relations between reading, critical aesthetics and literary innovation
• Ecocriticism, especially fiction’s potential to shape or voice a non-anthropocentric ethics

Research overview

My forthcoming monograph, The Embodied Reader in D.H. Lawrence’s Criticism and Fiction: Reading, Feeling and Narrative Form, offers a new reading of Lawrence’s critical and fictional modernism, setting it in dynamic dialogue with a recent, multifaceted turn in literary studies towards readers’ affective and embodied responses to texts. It argues that Lawrence’s critical works register, in their turbulent forms as well as their overt statements, the felt dimension of literary response, and explores how his affectively-charged critical practice is rooted in a distinct early-twentieth-century culture of autodidactic reading. Attending to Lawrence’s critical aesthetics of embodied reading, the book further argues, sheds new light on the means by which Lawrence’s own modernist fiction engages felt responses in the reader, and in particular the ethical significance of these.

My other main area of interest is in ecocriticism, and especially literature's potential to shape or voice an ecological ethics. I am working on a new project that explores how modernist and mid-century writers including Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen use fictional form to mediate embodied and affective responses to the nonhuman world, and the potential ecological significance of such narrative effects in the context of the developing Anthropocene.

I am also completing a novel that explores, in the form of a near-future fictional memoir, the unfolding, incalculable effects of ecological breakdown in rural Britain. 

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Writing the Planet (AREN292S7)

Publications