Guy Webster
PhD
English and Theatre Studies
Guy Webster is an academic living on unceded Wurundjeri land. His work has appeared in Textual Practice, Cambridge Quarterly, The Conversation, Cambridge Review of Books, British Modernist Association. He is currently in his third year of doctoral research at The University of Melbourne, researching conceptions of fear in the early 20th century and their function in the work of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair and Mary Butts.
He is Resident Arts Tutor at St Hilda's College, Co-Editor of Platform Journal and in 2022 was Vice-President of the Culture and Communication Graduate Committee (CCGC). Outside of his academic pursuits, Guy is an avid theatre reviewer, writing for Australian Book Review, Time Out Melbourne, Limelight Arts Magazine and Australian Arts Review. His non-fiction essays have also appeared in Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Metro Magazine and The Suburban Review.
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Thesis
Modernist Fear: Affecting Horror in Early 20th Century Modernism
My doctorate theorises the aesthetic function of the fear experience for early 20th century authors associated with the modernist movement. It views fear as a socio-political and culturally contingent affect that is important to modernist aesthetic preoccupations - including its relationship to the Gothic genre, the Grand Guignol, and wider cultural reckonings with ideas of post-war and male subjectivities. It looks to the works of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Emily Holmes Colman, Kenneth Macpherson and Mary Butts to better understand the function and development of fear within these areas.
Research interests
- Affect Theory
- Horror Studies
- Modernism
- Virginia Woolf
- D.H. Lawrence