Current and Recent Research Students
Mr Matthew Griffiths
Biography
Matthew is in the final stages of a PhD which revisits key modernist poems using ecocritical approaches. He is focusing on contemporary climate change as an intellectual, cultural and environmental crisis that challenges preconceptions about relations between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’, just as modernists challenged Romantic conceptions of selfhood and world. Rereading texts such as The Waste Land, Briggflatts, The Anathemata and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, he aims both to shed new light on 20th-century writing and offer productive insights into present-day discourses of climate change. He argues that a poetics of climate change must take account of the literary innovations of modernism rather than wallowing in sub-Romantic fantasies – as contemporary poems of environmental crisis are still wont to do.
Critical work is forthcoming in the journals symplokē and The Oxford Literary Review. Matthew has also published a science-fiction novel, The Weather on Versimmon, as well as numerous short stories in the Short Trips series. His poems have appeared in magazines from Anon to The Wolf, and a pamphlet is due from Red Squirrel Press in spring 2013.
