Hannah Smith

Biography

I'm a full-time PhD student in the Department of English at Keele University my thesis focuses on the ways that the poetry of the Auden Generation of poets interacts with the changing attitudes towards landscape and national and local identity during the mid-20th century and literary Modernism.

Research Interests

My primary research interests are in the fields of British and American poetry, with a special focus on the literatures of W. H. Auden and the Auden Generation of poets and their contemporaries. Broadly, my research interests include the changing representations of national identity in the literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth century, masculinity and the male body, emotional landscapes, the concept of mythology and national identity and the geographies of social class in twentieth-century poetry, amongst others.

I have also written on the idea of landscape and locality within the works of Dylan Thomas, Anglicisation and the ways in which the national literature of Wales engages with the heritage and hallmarks of the Cywyddwyr and the early medieval narratives of the Welsh bardic tradition.

I am in the first year of my PhD in English. My thesis interrogates the manner in which the early works of the Auden Generation engage with the natural landscape and the changing notions of nationalism and masculinity within the twentieth century following the contractionand eventual decline of the British Empire and colonial power, examining the poetry of the Modernist movement with reference to the ideas of 'Englishness' and the symbolism oflocality.

The writers and artists currently included as part of my thesis are W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh and Dylan Thomas, as well as examples from contemporary art and music, such as the art of Paul Nash and Edward Brian Seago, and the composer Benjamin Britten.

I am currently supervised by Professor Scott McCracken at Keele University, and Dr.Howard Booth and Dr. Ben Harker at the University of Manchester.

Prizes and Scholarships

AHRC Scholarship for PhD in English, 2014-17