Ben Carver

Ben Carver teaches literature and cultural theory at Aarhus University. Broadly defined, his research area is the cultural history of speculative fiction in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has written a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan, Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, of which Fredric Jameson writes: “The counterfactual has become a banality today, but this stimulating history of plural virtualities demonstrates how poetic our prosaic 19th century was in fact, and how productively it confronted its own unrealized possibilities.”

His current work studies the transformations of conspiracy in historical and technical contexts – for instance early modern stagecraft, nineteenth-century archival methods, and countercultural compositional techniques; also, the turn in literary and cultural studies, away from the excesses of “paranoid reading.” He is currently writing a paper on serialized invasion narratives in the Victorian and Edwardian press.

« back to all members