Dr Mark Brown

The works of Paul Auster, New York fiction, urban cultures, cultural geography, space and place, cultural constructions of place, cultural regeneration.

I am interested in literary urban cultures, particularly New York writing. I have written extensively on the New York novelist, poet, essayist and film-maker Paul Auster, and I am currently working on a new monograph on the contemporary New York novel.

I teach American literature modules as well as contemporary British literature and Critical Theory.

''A Portrait of a Soul in Ruins': Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions'. In Ciocia and Gonzales (eds). The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010. An essay exploring the relationship between the imagination and literary and filmic form in a recent Auster novel.

'Paul Auster: a poet of solitude' in David Seed (ed). The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century American Fiction. Blackwell, 2009. A substantial essay exploring major themes and texts in Auster’s work.

Paul Auster. MUP, 2007. A thorough exploration of key themes in Auster’s entire body of work to date (essays, poetry, novels, films and artistic collaborations), focusing in particular on the central role of New York and place in his aesthetic project.

‘ “We don’t go by numbers”: Baseball and Brooklyn in the films of Paul Auster’ in John Manbeck and Robert Singer (ed.s), The Brooklyn Film, McFarland, 2003. pp.127-147. A discussion of the representations of Auster’s own Brooklyn neighbourhood in his films, Smoke and Blue in the Face, deploying Cultural Geography for its insights into community. Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 227, Thomson Gale, 2007. p 142-53.

Forthcoming:
'Urban Perspective: dialogues between cultural geography and metropolitan fiction’. A critical survey of key cultural geographers working at the porous boundary between social sciences and literary criticism. Critical Engagements (2012)