Allan Pero

pero

Professor
Editor, English Studies in Canada

BA Theatre, University of Ottawa, 1990
BA Linguistics, University of Ottawa, 1994
BA English, University of Ottawa, 1994
MA English, University of Ottawa, 1995
PhD English, University of Toronto, 2001

University College 3418
519-661-2111 ext. 85816
apero@uwo.ca

Office Hours: Wednesdays, by appointment

Research

My teaching and research are focused on Modern British, Irish and American Literature, Drama, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory. Currently, I am working on a book-length project exploring the historical and philosophical underpinnings of Camp in modernism (Camp as in “How campy, dahling!”). I am also working on An Encyclopedia of Cultural Theory for the University of Toronto Press., and a critical edition of Wyndham Lewis' The Childermass for Oxford University Press.

Selected Publications

Books:

Co-Editor (with Gyllian Phillips) and Contributor, The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell(University Press of Florida, 2017).
Co-Author, "Introduction" The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell: 1-20.
“'Sunshades will usurp their space': Edith Sitwell, Sacheverell Sitwell, and the Dreaming Clowns of Melancholy," The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell: 75-93.
Introduction: Wyndham Lewis’ Self Condemned (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2010): 7-22.

Articles and Chapters:

“A Fugal Siege”: Sacheverell Sitwell’s Canons of Giant Art (1933) in Beyond Modernism: Noncanonicity and Early Twentieth Century British Literature (Forthcoming 2026) Editors: Andrew Frayn and Katie Jones. Bloomsbury Academic (7540 words)
“These tautomeric changes”: The Figures of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Humpty Dumpty in the Work of W. H. Auden in Modernism in Wonderland: Legacies of Lewis Carroll(2024) Editors: Michelle Witen and John Morgenstern. London: Bloomsbury Academic (7328 words)
“Whose Sex Is It Anyway?”: Lacan, Sexual Difference, and the Sinthomein English Studies in Canada Special Issue: “Lacan Now,” 47:2-3 (2023): 79-99. Guest Editor: Concetta Principe. (9678 words)
“A Carnival of Archaeology: Camp and Commemoration,”Modernism/modernity Print+ 7, Cycle 2 (2022) Editor: Andrew Frayn. (3111 words).
“Found his anxiety frothing”: Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure, and the Hotel as Camp Allegory in Hotel Modernisms; (2023): 137-51. Editors: Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Efterpi Mitsi. London: Routledge (7344 words)
In the Orbit of the Cephalopod: Lynda Barry’s What It Is and Artistic Education in the essay collection Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry, (2022): 99-111. Editor: Jane Tolmie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi (6423 words)
“A Pinch of Inquisitive Pleasure”: Wyndham Lewis, the Great War, and Military Surveillance in Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (2020): 25-41. Editors: Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. London: Palgrave Macmillan; (6083 words)
“Monster Cupid”: Brophy, Camp, and The Snow Ballin Brigid Brophy: Avant-garde Writer, Critic, Activist.(2020): 193-209. Editors: Gerri Kimber and Richard Canning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (6828 words)
“Paris hints of sacrifice”: Necropolitan Aesthetics in Tarrin The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies9 (2018): 1-23. (9137 words)
"Appalling Tabernacle of Self and Unbelief": Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars in Closet Drama: History, Theory, Genre. (2018): 83-94. New York and London: Routledge. Editor: Catherine Burroughs (6125 words)
“The Call of the Anterior”: Blanchot, Lacan, and the Death Drive in Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism. (2018): 247-262. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press; Editor: Christopher Langlois (7388 words)
“A Corporal Radioscopy”: Lacan, the Baroque, and the Posthuman in Lacan and the Posthuman. (2018): 47-65. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Co-Editors: Judith Roof and Svitlana Matviyenko (6786 words)
“Like Chasing a Scrap of Paper: Hysterical Detection in The Good Soldier” International Ford Madox Ford Studies (2017): 175–191. Editor: Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis Amsterdam: Brill Rodopi (7478 words)
“Jigging away in nothingness”: Knowledge, Language, and Feminine Jouissance in “Bliss” and “Psychology,” Katherine Mansfield and Psychology, Clare Hanson, Gerri Kimber, W. Todd Martin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P (September 2016): 100-112. (5929 words)
“Dispersed Are We: Voice as Technology in Between the Acts,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 85.1 (Spring 2016): 23-25. (3007 words)
“A Fugue on Camp,” Modernism/modernity, 23.1 (January 2016): 28-36. (2097 words)
“‘A Box and Cox Melodrama’: Love, Politics, and Truth in The Revenge for Love,” The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies5 (2014): 95-111. (6726 words)
“A Voice in the Alethosphere: Analysis and the Discourse of Economics,” Canadian Network for Psychoanalysis and Culture Anthology I (2015). Online. (5028 words)
“The Barest Fraction of Real Life”: Henry Arthur Jones, Anti-Realism, and the Scene of Truth, in Origins of English Dramatic Modernism: 1870-1914Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe and Gregory F. Tague. Bethesda, London, Dublin: Academica Press, 2010: 151-169. (6677 words)
“The Feast of Nemesis Media: Jean Cocteau’s The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party,”Modern Drama, 52.2: (2009): 192-206. (6987 words)
“The Chiasm of Revolution: Badiou, Lacan, Lefebvre,” The Symptom 10, (2009) (online) (6867 words)
“Look for One Thing and You Find Another”: The Voice and Deduction in Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, Modern Fiction Studies, 54.3 (Fall 2008): 558-573. (7865 words)
“The Crux of Melancholy: Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance,” Modern Drama,2 (Summer 2006): 174-187. (7035 words)
“Time Enough for Counting: Gambling and the Sense-Event As Symptom,” The Symptom7, (2006) (online) (4372 words)