Dr P D McDonald

Fellow and Tutor in English

E-mail: peter.mcdonald@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

For most of my professional life I have been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, mobile, and interconnected world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. This guiding preoccupation has informed my work on censorship, the rise of mass culture, media history and questions of the book, the public value of literature, critical theory, and interculturalism. It has also led me to write on an eclectic range of authors, including Arnold, Beckett, Bennett, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Brink, Breytenbach, Coetzee, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Derrida, Gordimer, Jensma, Lawrence, Matthews, Mphahlele, Ndebele, Pound, Serote, Woolf, and Yeats.

Teaching

I teach literatures in English from around 1830 to the present and critical theory.

Selected Publications

The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford, 2009).
Co-editor, with Derek Attridge, of Interventions 4.3, Autumn 2002 (Special issue on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace).
Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D. F. McKenzie, with Michael Suarez (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002)
British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1997)
Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13.2, 2008.
‘Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?’, PMLA, January 2006.
‘The Politics of Obscenity: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Apartheid State’, English Studies in Africa, 47.1, 2004.
‘The Writer, the Censor, and the Critic: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature’ in Jane Poyner ed., J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
‘Book History and Discipline Envy’, The European English Messenger, XIII: 1, Spring 2004: pp. 51-56.
‘Modernist Publishing: “Nomads and Mapmakers”’, A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw (Blackwells, 2003), 221-42.
‘Disgrace Effects’ Interventions 4.3, Autumn 2002, 321-30.

Dr P D McDonald

Fellow and Tutor in English

Research Interests

Teaching

Selected Publications

See also