Dr Tasha Alden

BA MSt D.Phil (Oxon)

Module Coordinator

• AB1 Critical Practice (EN11320)
• AB1 Literature since the '60s (EN22920)
• AB1 Ali Smith and 21st Century fiction(s) (EN33620)
• AB2 Queer and Now: 100 years of Queer Writing (ENM0220)
• AB2 We Have Always Been Here: Queer Writing from Antiquity to the Present (WL10820)

Lecturer

• AB2 Contemporary Writing and Climate Crisis (EN21120)
• AB1 Critical Practice (EN10120)
• AB1 Literary Theory: Debates and Dialogues (EN20120)
• AB1 Literature since the '60s (EN22920)
• AB1 Re-imagining Nineteenth-Century Literature (WL10120)
• AB1 Reading Theory / Reading Text (EN30120)
• AB1 Ways of Reading (PGM0410)

Tutor

• AB1 Critical Practice (EN11320)

Natasha's main research interest is British second generation fiction about the Two World Wars, or 'postmemory fiction'. Her doctoral work examines how the desire to bear witness to their parents' experiences, and to explore the enduring effects of the wars, compels some authors to write about the conflicts. Lacking experiences of their own, they turn to the historical record; her recent research has focussed on how authors use historical source material, exploring, for example, the ways in which Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) is built on many different historical sources such as novels, letters, memoirs and military histories. She argues that the ways in which the authors under discussion deployed researched historical material revealed yet a further evolution of Linda Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction, and a perhaps surprising move away from historical relativism. Her current work seeks to look beyond the use of source material, to analyse a broader spectrum of contemporary postmemory fiction revisiting the First and Second World Wars and asks why so many contemporary authors, many of them born long after 1918 and even 1945, return to those years.