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Ballaster, Professor Ros
Job Title: Professor of 18th Century Studies, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Mansfield
Period/ Subject: 18th Century
Email address: ros.ballaster@mansfield.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
I have a continuing interest in the representation and construction of the engagement with story as an ethical experience from the late seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century, especially in the popular novel and in the theatre. I am working to develop a project which will pay attention to the interaction with and role of the theatre in the invention of the ‘novel’ over this period. The intention here would not simply be to consider the use of novel plots as sources for plays but the presence of theatrical models of character, action and affect in the novel of the long eighteenth century, apprenticeships and continuing engagements with the theatre by more or less successful novelists. A related project concerns an attempt to construct a history of the idea of ‘candid’ (as opposed to ‘skeptical’) reading in literary, political and popular writings over the same period. I am interested in supervising doctoral students working in eighteenth-century women's wriing, the fiction of fantasy in the same period (it novels, oriental fiction, fairy tales), the early novel.
Teaching Interests:
Literature 1500-1800; the novel; Restoration and Georgian theatre; women’s writing; have taught special author options on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, John Dryden, Eliza Haywood, Jane Austen, Lord Byron.
Recent Publications:
ed. The History of British Women's Writing, 1690 - 1750: Volume Four History of British Women’s Writing (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) . ISBN-10: 0230549381 ISBN-13: 978-0230549388 . Includes two essays by Ros Ballaster. ‘Introduction’ ,1-19 and ‘Critical Review’, 235-251.
‘The Eastern Tale and the Candid Reader: Tristram Shandy, Candide, Rasselas’, in L’attrait de l’Orient/The Call of the East, special ed. proceedings of Colloque tenu en Sorbonne – 22-23 janvier 2010 of XVII-XVIII 67 (2010), 109-126. ISSN 0291-379.
Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 405 pages. ISBN 0-19-9267330.
ed. Fables of the East: Selected Tales 1662-1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 277 pp. ISBN 0-19-926735-9.
‘Jonathan Swift, the Stella poems,’ in A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 170-183. ISBN 1405113162
‘Orienting the English Novel : the shaping genius of the eastern tale in eighteenth-century Britain’ in Jenny Mander ed. Remapping the Rise of the European Novel (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007), pp. 237-48.ISBN 978-07294-09162
Other Information:
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