Dr Timothy Gao

My research explores the history, ethics, and aesthetics of virtual experience in nineteenth-century fiction. My monograph Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, identifies a historical fascination with artificial realities as an underexamined aspect of the novel tradition: one in which the form's combination of referentiality, specificity, and concreteness on the one hand, and openly proclaimed or accepted made-up-ness on the other, produces an experience of highly individual, explicitly imaginary objects and spaces which can be usefully understood as 'virtual'.

For the novelists and novel-readers I examine, virtuality is what the novel is for - for parasocial bonds with favourite characters, for nostalgic walks around imaginary towns, for vicarious participation in narrative action - experiences which are as equally rich for political, ethical, and aesthetic interpretation as structural or contextual features.

More broadly, I am also interested in the history and form of the novel, Victorian science and technology, narrative theory, reader-response and the history of criticism, digital adaptations of Victorian literature, literary representations of the digital, and more.