The modern (1918-present) German and Austrian novel and theories of the novel
Society and culture of the Weimar Republic
European modernism and the avant-garde
German theories of modernity and modernism; Frankfurt school; WalterBenjamin
Having edited the Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel (2004), and co-edited (with Philip Payne and Galin Tihanov) a Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Camden House 2007), I am now focussing on the 20th-century Austrian writer Hermann Broch, in particular his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) (1930-32).
In July 2009 Lancaster hosted a 3-day international symposium on Die Schlafwandler; the papers will be published as an edited volume. I am also working on my own monograph on the trilogy, to be published in 2012. Alongside this particularfocus on the novel, I am contributing a chapter on the writer's voluminous correspondence to a Broch Handbuch to be published by de Gruyter, and am in the early stages of planning (together with Galin Tihanov) a co-edited Companion to Broch's oeuvre.
Major and most recent publications:
(ed. with Anthony Waine), Brecht in Perspective (London/New York: Longman, 1982) (ed. with Anthony Waine), Culture and Society in the GDR (Dundee: GDR Monitor, 1984)
(ed. with Tony Pinkney and Ralf Rogowski), Walter Benjamin in the Postmodern (New Comparison, No. 18, Autumn 1994)
(ed. with Maurice Slawinski and David Steel), Reconstructing the Past: Representations of the Fascist Era in Post-War European Culture (Keele University Press, 1996)
The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel , ed. Graham Bartram (Cambridge 2004)
A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil, ed. Philip Payne, Graham Bartram and Galin Tihanov (Camden House, 2007)