Li Liu
Research
Thesis Working Title
‘What Do Texts Want?’: The Want and Liminality of Working-Class Females in Mid-Victorian Bourgeois Paternalistic Literature
Research Interests
This thesis examines three ‘bourgeois paternalistic novels’ from the 1840s to the 1860s, my term for a subgenre rhetorically addressed to the bourgeois narratee by a bourgeois, masculine (or presumably male), third-person omniscient narrator in a ‘paternalistic’ way: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848); George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859); and Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). Centring around three items, the dress, food, and doll, I identify three types of narrative styles in the three novels that make narrative unstable, polyvocal, and multiply interpretable and establish working-class female characters as ‘liminal’, namely, existing on the threshold regarding age, sexuality, gender, humanity, life and death, familial relations, and narrative positions. Mary Barton creates two personae for its narrator, a bourgeois maternal persona and a God-like one. Adam Bede suggests its narrator as both unreliable and authoritative. Our Mutual Friend sometimes transfers the omniscience of the narrator to certain characters. Drawing on narratology and theorising ‘liminality’ with Victorian childhood studies, this work embodies the inability of the narrator to frame the working-class female figures stably and consistently due to a tension between bourgeois doctrines and other beliefs about the proletarian female wants for power and liberty. As such, this thesis reframes ‘what does a woman want?’ as a narratological question, ‘what does a text want its characters to want?’ — one to which the Victorian novel could not find a stable answer. My work shows how the period’s ambivalence towards working-class females and their wants was the source of an ongoing inquiry rather than a definitive conclusion. Presenting the narration of these females as a quandary handed over to the reader for interpretation, my project challenges our preconceptions of a single authoritative class vision present in the period and our longstanding belief of female wants as a stable organising principle in Victorian fiction.
My further research interests include:
- Victorian studies
- narrative theories
- childhood studies
- consumer culture
- gender and sexuality
- animal studies
- digital humanities
Supervisors
Education
2019 – 23: PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies, The University of Warwick
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Viva: 14 July 2023; Degree conferral: 27 September 2023
- Viva Committee: Peter Orford, Emma Mason, Rochelle Sibley (Chair)
2017 – 18: MA Comparative Literature, University College London [Distinction]
2013 – 17: BA English, Anhui University [Grade: 90.23/100, thesis distinction]
2014 – 15: Exchange Programme, Providence University [Grade: 91/100]
Publication
- 21 November 2023: ‘What “Teeny” Group Seminar Teach Us: Enhancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Small Group Seminar through Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) and Anecdotal Pedagogy’, The Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice, 3 (2023) <https://doi.org/10.31273/jppp.vol3.2023.1483>(peer-reviewed)
- 16 December 2021: Co-author and Co-translator of ‘Leafing through Ali Smith’s Autumn: A Roundtable Discussion Amongst Young Researchers’ (从阿莉•史密斯小说《秋》看英国脱欧：青年学者圆桌会), New Perspectives on World Literature/ World Literature Recent Developments （外国文学动态研究）, 6 (2021), 25–37 < https://www.cnki.com.cn/Article/CJFDTotal-WGWD202106003.htm >. For the English version, see https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/yvi5bM8avAJL5SCJX9FVng. (peer-reviewed)
- 22 September 2021: ‘Seeing Jenny Wren as a “Child” Through the Bourgeois Lens: Narrative Distance and Absence in Our Mutual Friend’, in The Victorian Web < https://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/omf/liu.html > [accessed 22 September 2021]
- 25 March 2017: Co-author of ‘The Cultural Effect of English Play Rewriting to English Majors’ Language Ability — Taking Anhui University as an Example’ (戏剧教学在英语专业学生能力培养中的作用 ——安徽大学英语戏剧教学探索), Anhui Literature (安徽文学), 2 (2017), 122–124,127 <https://dx.doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1671-0703.2017.02.051> .
Conference
Presentation
18 August 2023: ‘What “Teeny” Group Seminar Teach Us: Enhancing Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Small Group Seminar through Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) and Anecdotal Pedagogy’, The Journal of PGR Pedagogic Practice Workshop, the University of Warwick, UK
17 May 2023: ‘“To Be or Not to Be”: Reading Dickens with Narrative Theories and Biographical Studies’, Biographical Turns across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, the University of Warwick, UK
5 – 8 January 2023: ‘Dombey and Son and Lover: Class Conflicts between Middle-Class Parents and Working-Class Children’, 2023 Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, San Francisco, US
1 – 3 September 2022: ‘“To See Is To Be”: (Ad)dressing Class and Gender in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848)’, 2022 British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) Conference, hosted by the University of Birmingham, UK
28 – 30 June 2022: ‘First-Person/Third-Person Shift: Narrative Instability and Character Liminality in George Eliot’s Adam Bede’, 2022 International Conference on Narrative, the ISSN’s 37th Annual Gathering, hosted by the University of Chichester, UK
12 – 14 July 2021: 'Seeing Jenny Wren as a "Child" Through the Bourgeois Lens: Narrative Distance and Absence in Our Mutual Friend', The 26th Annual Dickens Society Symposium (virtual due to the pandemic)
13 – 15 November 2020: ‘A Scandal of a Scandal: Flânerie in Modern Babylon’, 92nd Annual Conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA 92) (virtual due to the pandemic)
Organization
11 July, 2020: Co-organised with Ruby Turok-Squire, 'Rainbows in Our Windows: Childhood in the Time of Corona', a one-day international, interdisciplinary conference (virtual due to the pandemic). The conference proceedings were collected and edited in a special issue of Issues in English.
11 May 2020: Co-organised with Chunyan Jia, Anna Rivers, and Ruby Turok-Squire, '16th Annual English Postgraduate Symposium', a one-day roundtable showcasing the work of the University of Warwick’s postgraduates in English and Comparative Literary Studies and related disciplines (virtual due to the pandemic)
Work Experience
Teaching
2021 – 22: Seminar Tutor, EN122 Modes of Reading, University of Warwick
2020 – 21: Seminar Tutor Assistant, EN122 Modes of Reading, University of Warwick
Editorial Work
2022 - 23: Assistant Editor of The Charles Dickens Letters Project
Grants and Awards
2022: MLA Convention Grants for Graduate Students Residing outside the United States ($400)
2022: Humanities Research Fund for MLA conference (£600)
2022: Humanities Research Fund for BAVS conference (£100)
2020: WRSA Bursary Fund for Rainbows in Our Windows Conference (£100)
2019-2023: CSC-Warwick Joint Scholarship (three-year tuition waiver+£1200 pounds per month maintenance stipend)
Development and Training
12 October 2023: Digital Humanities in Practice: From Research Questions to Results (Valid Certificate ID: f5f88d5ea1294fe69c21f1b3bf4ec824), certified by edX – Harvard University
20 March 2023: Introduction to Digital Humanities (Valid Certificate ID: 8b641b22d63b4eb9b271a51bf24344ec), certified by edX – Harvard University
15 February 2023: Digital humanities: humanities research in the digital age, certified by OpenLearn – Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership
21 October 2022: Associate Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) (Reference: PR252454), awarded by the completion of the Academic and Professional Pathway for Postgraduate Researchers who Teach (APP PGR)
Professional Membership
June 2023 – June 2024: Dickens Fellowship
January 2023 – January 2024: D.H. Lawrence Society of North America (DHLSNA)
July 2022 – July 2023: British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS)
March 2022 – March 2023: Modern Language Association (MLA)
February 2022 – February 2023: The International Society for the Study of Narrative
May 2021 – May 2022: The Dickens Society
July 2020 – June 2021: The South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA)