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Professor Darryl Jones BA (York), DPhil (York), F.T.C.D.Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture; Co-ordinator Columbia Dual Degree

Research and Teaching Interests

My major research and teaching interest is in the general area of popular literature, particularly in the fields of horror fiction and film, and of Victorian and Edwardian supernatural and adventure fiction. Most specifically, I am interested in writers such as M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, and their contemporaries in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century popular literature. My edition of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James was published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and I have also edited Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Gothic Tales, all for OUP. My most recent book, Horror: A Very Short Introduction was published by OUP in 2021.

I am currently General Editor of the New Oxford Sherlock Holmes, a 9-volume collection to be published in 2025, for which I am editing The Hound of the Baskervilles. I am editing The Green Flag for the 20-volume Edinburgh Edition of Conan Doyle’s work. I am also writing a large-scale biography of M. R. James, to be published by OUP.

I have a long-standing teaching and research interest in the nineteenth-century novel, and most particularly the work of Jane Austen, on whom I published a monograph in 2004. As a native speaker of Welsh, I also find myself making occasional interventions in the subjects of Welsh culture and literature. I have supervised numerous PhDs in the general area of popular literary studies.

Current and recent PhD topics have included:

John Wyndham
Menstruation and female blood in horror fiction and film.
The cultural representation of the serial killer
Jane Austen and national identity
Postmodern vampires
Haunted space in American horror
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Fin-de-siècle invasion narratives
Nuclear and cold-war fiction and culture
Antarctic Gothic
Overpopulation in nineteenth-century fiction
Beast-men in the nineteenth-century novel
Ayn Rand
Fin-de-siècle mad science
The ‘Portrait of the Artist’ in Victorian and Modernist Fiction
Feminist vampires

Publications

Books

M. R. James: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, edited with an introduction and notes by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Green Flag, edited with an introduction and notes by Darryl Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
Horror: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 168pp.
Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), xii+181pp.
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, edited with an introduction and notes by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxxvi+182pp.
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, edited with an introduction and notes by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xl+125pp.
Arthur Conan Doyle, Gothic Tales, edited with an introduction by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), xl+549pp.
Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson, edited with an introduction by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) xlii+510pp.
Beautiful Strangers: Ireland and the World of the Fifties, eds. Gerald Dawe, Darryl Jones and Nora Pelizzari (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) ix+197pp.
It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, eds. Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xiv+262pp.
M. R. James, Collected Stories, edited with an introduction by Darryl Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) iiixv+468pp.
Reinterpreting Emmet: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet, eds. Anne Dolan, Patrick Geoghegan and Darryl Jones, (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), 258pp.
Jane Austen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 252pp.
Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London: Arnold; and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 220pp.
Studying Poetry (London: Arnold; and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), repr. 2001, 188pp. [with Stephen Matterson]

Studying Poetry, Second edition, revised and expanded (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) [with Stephen Matterson], 200pp.
Studying Poetry, Chinese edition (Shanghai: Foreign Language Education Press, 2019), 200pp.

Articles

‘M. R. James’s Libraries’, in Alice Crawford and Robert Crawford, eds. Libraries in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
‘Occult Horror’, in Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
‘M. R. James’, in Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
‘M. R. James: Towards a New Biography’, Ghosts and Scholars, 40 (2021), 8-15.
‘The China Virus: Invasion, Contagion, and the “Yellow Peril”. Critical Quarterly, 62 (4) (2020), pp. 41-48.
‘J. W. Dunne: The Time Traveller’, in Trish Ferguson, ed. Literature and Modern Time: Technological Modernity, Glimpses of Eternity. Experiments with Time (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 209-32.
‘The Horror Story’, in Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 175-192.
‘Horror Studies: Between Humanistic Interdisciplinarity and Scientific Consilience’, Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 5 (2018), pp. 158-71.
‘On the Many Psychos of Cinema’, Crimereads (October 2018): https://crimereads.com/on-the-many-psychos-of-cinema/.
‘M. R. James’, in Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, eds. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 134-141.
‘“Visions of Another Albion”: Clive Barker and the Horror of 1980s Britain’, in Sorcha Ní Fhláinn, ed. Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 25-40.
‘Oscar Cook’, in Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, eds. Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors, Artists, and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), pp. 50-53.
‘Iron Mike and Me: The Fall and Further Fall of Mike Tyson’, in David Scott, eds. Cultures of Boxing (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 75-88.
‘In Defence of Horror’, in Alice Northover, ed. The OUPblog Tenth Anniversary Book: Ten Years of Academic Insights for the Thinking World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 240-47.
‘Dracula Goes to London’, in Sylvie Mikowski, ed. Ireland and Popular Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 19-38.
‘The Lair of the White Worm; or, What became of Bram Stoker?’, in Jarlath Killeen, ed. Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 163-178.
‘The Dead Walk!: The Zombie Phenomenon and the Mysterious Workings of Popular Culture’, Shanghai Review of Books, 256, 2013, pp. 5-6.
‘Foreword’, in Helen Conrad-O’Briain and Gerard Hynes, eds. J. R. R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 6-7.
‘ Fantasia”: Under Milk Wood in the 1950s’, in Beautiful Strangers: Ireland and the World of the Fifties, eds. Gerald Dawe, Darryl Jones and Nora Pelizzari (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 35-50.
‘“Gone into mourning for the death of the Sun:” Victorians at the End of Time’, in Trish Ferguson, ed. Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp.178-195.
‘“as if the waters had but just retired from the face of the earth”: The Flood in Victorian Fiction”, Literature and Theology, 26:4 (2012) pp. 439-58.
‘Welsh Nationalist Horror’, Almanac: The Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English, 15 (2011), pp. 1-28.
‘“It's in the Trees! It's Coming!”: Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire’, in Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy, eds. It Came from the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 33-59.
‘Ultima Thule: Arthur Gordon Pym, the Polar Imaginary and the Hollow Earth’, Edgar Allan Poe Review, XII: 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 51-69.
‘Robert Aickman, the Ghost Story, and the Idea of Englishness’, in Helen Conrad-O'Briain and Julie-Anne Stephens, eds. The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghosty Genre (Dublin, Four Courts, 2010), pp. 61-80.
‘Horror’, in M. Keith Booker, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), vol. 3, p. 1120-25.
‘Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror’, Irish Universities Review, 17:1 (2009), pp. 31-44.
‘H.G. Wells and the Imagination of Disaster’, in Philip Coleman, ed. On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations(Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), pp. 129-47.
‘Hunters and Patriots: The Fiction of the American Neo-Nazi Movement’, in Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, eds. Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), pp. 103-122.
‘Scenes from the Decline and Fall of the American Empire’, Forum, 5 (2007), pp. 1-15.
‘The Liberal Antichrist: Left Behind in America’, in Crawford Gribben and Kenneth Newport, eds. Expecting the End: Millennialism in Social and Historical Context (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 97-112.
‘“King of the Castle’: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King’, in Bernice Murphy, ed. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2005), pp. 214-36 [with Dara Downey].
‘“Distorted Nature in a Fever”: Irish Bulls, Irish Novels, the 1798 Rebellion, and their Gothic Contexts’, in Heidi Kaufman and Chris Fauske, eds. 'An Uncomfortable Authority:' Maria Edgeworth and her Contexts (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 127-44.
‘Radical Ambivalence: Frances Burney, Jacobinism, and the Politics of Romantic Fiction’, Women's Writing 10:1 (2003), pp. 3-26.
‘“A Fancy Name in that Incestuous Context”: Dannie Abse Writing About Wales,' Poetry Ireland Review, 62 (Autumn 1999), pp. 79-83.
‘Gothic Parody’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed. The Handbook of Gothic Literature, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 270-71.
‘“I Failed Utterly”: Saunders Lewis and the Cultural Politics of Welsh Modernism’, The Irish Review, 19 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp. 22-43.
‘Celtic Nationalism and Postcolonial Theory’, SPAN, 41 (October 1995), pp. 28-36.
‘Frekes, Monsters and the Ladies: Attitudes to Female Sexuality in the 1790s’, Literature and History 4:2 (Autumn 1995), pp. 1-24.