Brian May

Brian May

Professor
19th-century British Literature

Office: RH 321
Email: bmay1@niu.edu

Educational Background

  • Ph.D. University of Virginia; 1991
  • M.A. University of Virginia; 1986
  • B.S. Virginia Polytechnic Institute; 1981

Professional Interests

  • Modernism, Edwardianism, The Novel, Postcolonial literature, Political and Philosophical approaches to literature
  • Works of E. M. Forster, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Conrad, J.M. Coetzee, George Orwell

Selected Publications

  • 1948. A Critical and Creative Prequel to Orwell’s 1984. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2023. 189 pp..
  • “Katherine Mansfield, Post-Impressionist.” Modern Fiction Studies. 69.1 (Spring 2023): 22-47.
  • “Modernism in Chinua Achebe’s African Tetralogy.” In Modernism, Postcolonialism and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present, Ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, 33-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • “The Red Glove” (story), 1888. The Cost of Paper 4 (summer 2017): 99-109.
  • Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction, 1958-1988. Columbia and New York: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 246 pp..
  • “Extravagant Postcolonialism: Ethics and Individualism in Anglophonic, Anglocentric Postcolonial Fiction; Or, ‘What was (this) Postcolonialism?’” ELH: English Literary History 75.4 (winter 2008): 899-937.
  • “Reading Coetzee, Eventually.” Contemporary Literature 48.4 (Winter 2007): 629-638.
  • “Romancing the Stump: Modernism and Colonialism in Forster’s Passage to India.” Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1889-1939, Ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, 136-61. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007.
  • The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1997. 210 pp..