Departmental homepageDr Bryan was brought up in Durham, where she attended Durham Johnston Comprehensive School. She completed her BA, MPhil and PhD at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was a visiting student at Harvard. Before joining St John's, she spent five years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Dr Bryan works on and teaches British and American literature of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
At Part I, she teaches 'English Literature and its Contexts 1830-1945', 'English Literature and its Contexts 1870-Present' and 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice'.
At Part II, she teaches 'Tragedy', 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice II' and 'Prose Forms: 1936-1956'.
She also supervises undergraduate dissertations from across the modern and contemporary period and graduate students on topics relating to her research interests.
Dr Bryan's research focuses on literary responses to war and conflict; she is particularly interested in the role played by literary style in both facilitating the work of consolation and subjecting it to ethical interrogation. Her first monograph, Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War (Cambridge: CUP, 2024), examines post-war writings from across the 20th century that register the role played by consolatory counterfactuals in individual and national responses to mass violence. The book uncovers an under-studied grouping of writers on the borderline between modernist experimentalism and classical realism, and argues that the formal, stylistic and ethical complexity of their work arises from a sensibility attuned to both the regenerative impulses that accompany violent destruction and the value placed upon consolation and tradition within war-ravaged societies. She is currently working on a number of new research projects. Her second monograph, Post-war Guilt and the Literary Imagination, charts British literature’s treatment of those diverse forms of extra-legal war guilt that gripped the world after 1945. She is also co-editing The Other House, Henry James’s 1896 novel of infanticide and collective guilt, for The Cambridge Complete Fiction of Henry James.
Bryan, Rachel. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Bryan, Rachel. "Henry James and Incompleteness." Essays in Criticism, vol. 72, no. 1, 2022, pp. 53-76.
Bryan, Rachel. "Henry James, George Eliot, and the 'Old-fashioned English Novel'." The Henry James Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 2021, pp. 192-212.
Bryan, Rachel. "Unlived Lives, Imaginary Widowhood and Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love." The Review of English Studies, vol. 72, no. 303, 2021, pp.129-46.
