Victoria Wirtz, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
Doctoral Research Project

Drawing on works by Bernadine Evaristo, Tash Aw, Jackie Kay, Édouard Louis, Brian Broom and Kerry Hudson, the project examines how global and national literary prizes influence the circulation and canonicity of queer working-class autobiographies, exploring the conception of dissident identities and narratives of class transfer in relation to or in tension with the political/economic meanings embedded in awards and publishing markets. The authors and works under consideration open up controversies about queerness, migration and/or social conditions in a declassed milieu, questioning the concept of linear life trajectories. The queer and/or diasporic perspective thus introduced offers a new path through precarity and changes the temporality of conventional Western narratives of success and social mobility.