Dr Katharine Murphy

Research Interests

Dr Katharine Murphy welcomes enquiries about postgraduate supervision (for MRes and PhD degrees) in any of the following fields:

  • Spanish Modernism;
  • Comparative Literature (particularly the Spanish and English Modernist novel);
  • the New Woman in Spanish fiction;
  • visual culture and the early twentieth-century novel in Spain.

The New Woman in Spanish Fiction 1900-1936

The central significance of women has long been recognised in the works of late nineteenth-century authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán. However, female characters have commonly been deemed marginal to early twentieth-century male-authored fiction and its perceived focus on male subjectivity. My research aims to reassess the representation of the female subject – including the New Woman – in the works of the so-called ‘Generation of 1898’: Pío Baroja, Azorín, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others. I have published an article on the female nude in Blasco Ibáñez’s La maja desnuda; further articles on the female psyche in Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez are in press.

Spanish Modernism and Comparative Literature

Transnational Modernisms in Rosa Chacel and Virginia Woolf: This comparative project analyses the early fiction of Rosa Chacel and Virginia Woolf as counterparts across borders. It aims to illuminate the ongoing critical reassessment of Spanish Modernist authors of the early twentieth century within a pan-European and international context, and focuses on the early novels and short stories of each author published between 1915 and the 1930s. I have recently published two articles on Rosa Chacel in the context of Spanish Modernism and the avant-garde.

My previous research takes a comparative approach to the early twentieth-century Spanish novel, and argues for the inclusion of Spain in mainstream European culture during this period. My first monograph Re-reading Pío Baroja and English Literature (Berne: Peter Lang, 2004) draws close comparisons between Baroja and the novels of his contemporaries in England and Ireland, such as Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and others, in order to demonstrate the participation of Baroja, alongside other Spanish authors, in the incipient development of European Modernism. A major review stated that the book ‘merits the attention of all scholars of Modernism, and not just of the "Peninsular" variety: for its important contribution to the revision - and more importantly renovation - of our critical awareness regarding Pío Baroja' (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 84. 3 (2007), 421-424).

Visual Culture and the Spanish Modernist Novel

Experiments in Genre: The Modernist Novel in Spain: This interdisciplinary project examines the connections between visual culture and the early twentieth-century Spanish novel. It seeks to investigate the spatialisation of prose narrative through the incorporation of painting and other visual media, as well as the interactions between the arts, in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Spain.

Research Supervision

Postgraduate Supervision since 2001

  • Co-supervision of PhD on ‘Social and Cultural Transformations in 1960s Madrid' (AHRC funded), Alex Cattell, 2005-2008.