About 

Anna Watz is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of English Literature

She holds a PhD from Uppsala University (2012) and an MA from the University of East Anglia (2000). In 2021 she was promoted to ‘Docent’ (Associate Professor).

Her current research (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2019-2022) examines the intersection between surrealist women’s art and writing and the emergence of French poststructuralist/psychoanalytic feminist theory.

Watz is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

She is Reviews Editor for The International Journal of Surrealism (University of Minnesota Press), an editorial board member of the research network and journal Intersec+ions (Cardiff University), and an advisory board member of the Angela Carter Society (UWE, Bristol). Between 2018-2020 she served a three-year term as author of the section ‘Feminisms’ for the annual journal The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press).

Publications

Monograph

Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’. 2016. London and New York: Routledge. Reviewed in The Year’s Work in English Studies (2019), Contemporary Women’s Writing (2018), Gothic Studies (2018), Irish Gothic Journal (2018) and ASAP/Journal (2017). 

Edited books

Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration. 2020. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reviewed in French Studies (2021).

A History of the Surrealist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; forthcoming 2022.

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters

‘Maternities: Dorothea Tanning’s Aesthetics of Touch’. Art History (forthcoming; accepted for publication).

‘Feminist Encounters with Surrealism: Revisiting the Formative Critiques’. The Routledge Companion to Surrealism, ed. Kirsten Strom. London and New York: Routledge; forthcoming.

‘Introduction’. A History of the Surrealist Novel, ed. Anna Watz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; forthcoming.

‘The Mother Figure in the Surrealist Novel’. A History of the Surrealist Novel, ed. Anna Watz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; forthcoming.

‘Surrealism and écriture féminine’. 2021. Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism, ed. Natalya Lusty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 363–379.

‘Leonora Carrington’s Poetics of Listening’. 2021. Modernist Intimacies, ed. Elsa Högberg. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 164–180.

“‘Scattered and Recomposed”: Poststructuralist Play in The Passion of New Eve’. 2021. Ludics and Laughter as Feminist Aesthetic: Angela Carter at Play, ed. Sarah Gamble, Jennifer Gustar, and Caleb Sivyer. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. 139–156.

‘Feminisms’. 2020. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 28: 311–328.

‘Introduction’. 2020. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration, ed. Anna Watz. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1–16.

‘Identity Convulsed: Leonora Carrington’s The House of Fear and The Oval Lady’. 2020. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration, ed. Anna Watz. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 42–67.

‘Feminisms’. 2019. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 27: 201–219.

‘Women’s Writing, écriture féminine, and femellitude: A Conversation with Xavière Gauthier’. 2019. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 13:1. 1–15.

‘Feminisms’. 2018. The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 26: 368–387.

The Stone Door and Poststructuralist Feminism’. 2017. Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde, ed. Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 90–104.

[In Swedish] ‘Njutningens problematik: postfeminism, normativitet och “mommy porn”’ (‘The Problem of Pleasure: Postfeminism, Normativity, and “Mommy Porn”’). 2014. Edda: Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning101:4. 292–305.

“‘Look! Hands Off!”: The Performance of Female Exhibitionism in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus’. 2013. Naked Exhibitionism: Gendered Performance and Public Exposure, ed. Claire Nally and Angela Smith. London: I. B. Tauris. 41–61.

‘The Surrealist Uncanny in Shadow Dance’. 2012. Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, ed. Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips. London: Bloomsbury. 117–129.

‘Angela Carter and Xavière Gauthier’s Surréalisme et sexualité’. 2010. Contemporary Women’s Writing 4:2. 100–113.

‘Convulsive Beauty and Compulsive Desire: The Surrealist Pattern of Shadow Dance’. 2006. Revisiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, ed. Rebecca Munford. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 21–41.

Publications (DiVA)

The Language and Culture Research Environment

Organisation