LUCY JEFFERY
Lucy Jeffery’s research focuses on twentieth-century literature and culture. Her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process, considers how Samuel Beckett’s writing process was influenced by the paintings, music, and broadcasting media that he admired and with which he experimented. She has also written several chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals about the interdisciplinary work of Ezra Pound, Harold Pinter, and Ingeborg Bachmann. In 2022, she co-edited the 'A New Poetics of Space' special issue of Green Letters, which examines creative responses to the climate crisis as seen in representations of walking in literature and performance.
After an initial trip to Budapest in April 2019 and countless more visits since then, Lucy’s interest in twentieth-century Hungarian literature and culture led to publications on one of Hungary’s best loved writers, Magda Szabó. Lucy is currently writing an article on the poet Miklós Radnóti entitled ‘A Forced March from Serbia to Hungary: Reading Miklós Radnóti’s Bori notesz as the Diary of a Refugee’ which picks up on her interests in the tradition of the literary walk and in twentieth-century Hungarian literature.
Lucy’s involvement in the ‘Replaying Communism’ project is a continuation of this research into Hungary’s fraught cultural context during the years of occupation (first German then Soviet), albeit from a contemporary perspective. Having published on radio and television in her work on Beckett and Pinter, Lucy is drawing on this knowledge, and on insights from her trip to the OSA, for her work with Dr Anna Váradi. Their collaboration will result in the symposium in December 2023 and the publication of two articles that explore representations of the Communist era in Hungary and the parallels between Party censorship then and Government censorship today.
Please get in touch if you would like to contact Lucy about any of her research.
Selected works
Monograph
Editorial work
I have edited 10 interviews with internationally leading practitioners for Staging Beckett, see: https://research.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/interviews-talks/
With Vicky Angelaki, I co-edited a special issue for Green Letters: A New Poetics of Space Special Issue: Green Letters, 26.3 (2022). The introduction is Open Access.
Book chapters
‘Beckett and the Visual Arts’ in The Oxford Handbook on Samuel Beckett eds. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle (Oxford: OUP, 2023) (in press)
‘Words and Music “or some other trouble”: Vaguening on the Airwaves’ in Beckett and Technology eds. Einat Adar, Galina Kiryushina, and Mark Nixon (Edinburgh: EUP, 2021), 109-124
'Collective Responsibility in Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze’s Radio Drama The Cicadas’ in Radio Art and Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Politics, eds. Jarmila Mildorf and Pim Verhulst (Minneapolis: Lexington Books, 2020), 185-205
Peer-reviewed articles
‘A Forced March from Serbia to Hungary: Reading Miklós Radnóti’s Bori notesz as the Diary of a Refugee’ (in progress)
‘A Besúgó and the rise of “Communist-cool” television’, Critical Studies in Television (forthcoming)
‘An Interview with writer-director Bálint Szentgyörgyi: “Hungarian export, not American import”.’, Hungarian Cultural Studies (in press)
'Introduction', A New Poetics of Space Special Issue eds. Jeffery and Angelaki: Green Letters, 26.3 (2022), 203-209
with Anna Váradi, ‘A Metatopographic Reading of Magda Szabó’s Abigail as a Response to the Treaty of Trianon’, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 48.3 (2021), 223-245
‘Palliative Care and the Dance of Death in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight’, The Harold Pinter Review, 5.1 (2021), 10-17
‘Magda Szabó: Finding Home in the Homeland in Post-1956 Hungary’, [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 11.3 Changing Pieces (2020), 1-23
‘Natasha Gordon in Conversation with Lucy Jeffery: “it was around 7.27pm that suddenly diversity walked through the door”’, ArtsPraxis, 7.2b (2020), 26-52
‘An Interview with Tim Parkinson’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 29.2 (2020), 249-260
‘Ezra Pound and Constantin Brancusi: sculptural form and the struggle to “make it cohere”’, Word & Image, 36.3 (2020), 237-247
‘“An Old Hullo Out of the Dark”’: Radio echoes between Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 40.3 Harold Pinter’s Transmedial Histories (2020), 516-532
‘Pinter as Poet, Pinter as Politician’, The Harold Pinter Review, 4.1 (2020), 20-35
‘Music in Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers: “I shouldn’t be hearing that!”’, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 16.2 (2018), 173-184
‘Samuel Beckett’s brush with the other Mitchell: Painterly Techniques in “One Evening”’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 27.2 (2018), 175-192
‘Samuel Beckett’s use of color in Company: Blue’, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 20. 4 (2018), 507-527
‘Bridging Music and Language in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume’, Durham Postgraduate English Journal, 32 (Spring, 2016)
Future Projects
Lucy is currently working on a paper entitled: ‘A Forced March from Serbia to Hungary: Reading Miklós Radnóti’s Bori notesz as the Diary of a Refugee’. This is part of a larger project concerning the reception of twentieth-century Hungarian literature in Anglophone countries. The research asks:
Who are the major cultural voices in 20th-century Hungarian literature and visual culture?
How did Hungarian writers and artists work during times of war and occupation and how was their work influenced by the effects of the Treaty of Trianon (1921)?
How did government censorship affect the dissemination of Hungarian literature and culture in Hungary, Western Europe, and Anglophone countries?
How can we address the dearth of women and LGBTQ creatives in the Hungarian cultural canon throughout the 20th-century?
Why is Hungarian literature and culture marginalised in Anglophone countries and in what ways have sustained isolationist policies in Hungary (since 1921) impacted Western perceptions of Hungary today?