Dr Helen Craske

My research focuses on French literary, media, and visual culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I have published prize-winning articles on avant-garde writers such as Rachilde, Jean Lorrain, and Remy de Gourmont. My first book, entitled Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature, came out with Oxford University Press in 2024. This project analyses the representation and creation of shared crime and guilt in late nineteenth-century France: an era when writers, publishers, and editors faced trial alongside one another as accomplices in literary crimes such as obscenity, libel, and political sedition. Throughout my analysis, I ask questions about reading and reception, highlighting the ways in which fin-de-siècle authors encouraged readers to share responsibility for ideas and works considered immoral, if not outright illicit. To do this, I consider a wide range of genres, including psychological novels, murder fiction, and the saucy magazine.

Inspired by this latter example, I am writing my second book: a literary history of the saucy magazine, c. 1880–1914. In a period of French history when the newspaper trade was booming, an array of low-cost titillating reviews entered the mass media marketplace and flourished there. My study charts the genre’s evolution, themes, and aesthetic tendencies, in order to assess its contribution to turn of the century French culture. 

FR1: Introduction to French literature, film and thought

FR5: Revolutions in writing, 1700-1900

Literary theory seminars