Helen Craske

Helen Craske is a DPhil candidate at Merton College, University of Oxford. Her doctoral research project explores ‘complicity’ in fin-de-siècle literature, offering thematic analysis of morality, criminality, and subversion, alongside a wider appreciation of the textual strategies whereby relationships of collusion were constructed between readers, writers, and critics. She is interested in French literature c.1848-1914, especially the fin de siècle, and aims to pay particular critical attention to the intersection between novelistic and periodical cultures. Her other academic interests include: libertinage, the works of Roland Barthes, and Literary Theory.

She was co-awarded the 2018 NCFS (Nineteenth-Century French Studies) Postgraduate Prize, for an essay entitled 'Selling Scandal: Infamy and Complicity in Rachilde and Lorrain'. She also won the 2017 SDN (Society of Dix-Neuviémistes) Postgraduate Prize, for her essay ‘The Decadent Ideal of Impenetrability’, which has since been published in Dix-Neuf as: "Desire and the demi-vierge: The Impenetrable Ideal in Decadent Fiction" (21: 1-2, pp. 23-38): https://doi.org/10.1080/14787318.2018.1476438.