Skip to content
Skip to navigation menu

Dr Heather Worthington

Overview

Dr Heather Worthington Position: Reader Email: WorthingtonHJ@cf.ac.uk
Telephone: +44(0)29 208 75595
Extension: 75595
Location: John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cathays, Cardiff

Research Group

English Literature

Research Interests

Crime fiction and criminography from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the nineteenth-century periodicals; sensation fiction; the theorisation of children’s literature and the cultural and literary construction of the child; twentieth-century children’s literature; the reception and influence of popular literature generally.

Selected Publications

The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

‘Identifying Anarchy in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday’ in To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, eds. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).

’Against the Law: Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime’, in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan C. Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).

‘From Children’s Story to Adult Fiction: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King’, Arthuriana, 12:2. (Summer 2002).

Publications

The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

‘Identifying Anarchy in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday’ in To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century British Literature, eds. H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).

’Against the Law: Bulwer’s Fictions of Crime’, in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan C. Christensen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).

‘From Children’s Story to Adult Fiction: T. H. White’s The Once and Future King’, Arthuriana, 12:2 (Summer 2002).

 

Research

Heather Worthington specialises in criminography, particularly the development of the crime fiction genre in the nineteenth century, which is her main area of research. Her interest in twentieth-century crime fiction is focused on the variations in the genre between the 1920s and the present day, especially in terms of gender politics and the representation of violence. Her research into children’s literature is concerned with the changing cultural constructions and perceptions of the child and childhood as demonstrated in the children’s fiction of the twentieth century. Her publications range from a monograph on the development of the detective in the first half of the nineteenth century to a study of the narrative developments of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Heather is committed to the productive interplay between popular literature and contemporary critical and cultural theory, with a particular interest in Michel Foucault and his work on discipline and ideology. She is currently working on a furher monograph, Shadowing Sherlock Holmes: Themes in Crime Fiction 1850-1900, which takes a Foucauldian approach to the relationships between the texts and their contemporary audiences. She is also working on a text book, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, for Palgrave Macmillan, and will be contributing a major chapter on nineteenth-century crime fiction to the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (to be published in 2009).

Biography