Lara Feigel
Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, King’s College London
I am Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. I work on twentieth-century literature and culture. I am both a literary critic and a cultural historian and I am invested in finding new ways to represent the complex relationships between life, literature and history. I am a 2013 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. As a result, much of my work crosses genres and disciplines. I am the author of four works of cultural history in which I explore the relationship between works of literature, the times they’re written in, the impact of history on the books and the lives of the creators of the books, and how both the life shapes the work and the work shapes the life.
EXPs by Lara Feigel
Being interested in what happened to culture in post-war Germany is a way to think about how culture responds to or fails to respond to political upheaval and social disaster.
The depression of the late 1920s resulted in a huge rise in unemployment and mass poverty that led many writers wondering how they could make their work relevant.
As far as Lawrence’s reputation was concerned, the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover rightly established him as a crucial figure in shaping modern attitudes to sex.