Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies

Academic Staff

Dr Anna Clarke : Part-time Teacher

Position in departmentPart-time Teacher
E-mailamclar (non Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk)
Telephone2630 (non Essex users should add 01206-87 to the beginning of this number)
Room5A.131
Qualifications BA OU; MA Essex; PhD Essex
Research interestsMy doctoral thesis, In a Postcolonial World: The Indian Novel in English, examined what happens to a cultural form when it arrives on a terrain different from the one in which it originated. The form in question is the novel, introduced to India during the nineteenth century as part of British colonizing mission. As the novel in India acquired functions which diametrically opposed those intended in imperialist policies, I investigated the trajectory of the novel from an imperial agent to a “declaration of independence”. Focusing on Indian English writing my research probed the circumstances of the novel’s arrival in India, its participation in the fight for independence, and its active role in postcolonial debates. Considering the interface between fiction, criticism and theory, I discussed the work of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal and Arundhati Roy.

Fellow of Higher Education Academy

Associate Editor of The Journal of Contemporary Literature

Other research interests: Shakespeare; postcolonial theory; interdisciplinary debates over the issues of representation and formations of identities; development of the novel form; the nineteenth-century novel; modernism and postmodernism  

PublicationsLink to publications for Anna Clarke
Conferences/presentationsJuly 2008, The Novel and Its Borders, The University of Aberdeen, Centre for The Novel in Association with the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies - “Hoist with his own petard”: The Indian English Novel

May 2005, 10th International Cultural Studies Symposium: When “Away” Becomes “Home” -Cultural Consequences of Migration, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, - paper on “Cultural Identities in the Context of Migration – Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye Blackbird”

July 2004, New Hybridities: Societies and Cultures in Transition, University of Munich, Kloster Seeon, Germany – paper on “Hybridity and Syncretism in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”

February 2003, Inter-University Post-Colonial Studies Seminar, Univeristy of London/ Open Univeristy, Institute of English Studies, London – paper on “Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things”  

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