Accessibility Page Navigation
Style sheets must be enabled to view this page as it was intended.
University of Oxford Faculty of English
Home » About the Faculty » Faculty Members » Search Members by Period

Johnston, Dr Freya

 

Job Title: University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: St Anne's
Period/Subject: Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Comparative Literature

Email address: freya.johnston@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I'm working on two things at the moment. The first is a collection of fifteen essays, co-edited with Lynda Mugglestone (Pembroke), called Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (Oxford University Press, 2012).

I'm also a general co-editor, with Matthew Bevis (Keble), of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Marilyn Butler’s Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context (1979) began by observing that 'The modern age ought to be a propitious one for Peacock, more apt than any since his own'. The New Oxford DNB entry on Peacock supports such a view: 'in the early twenty-first century Peacock is widely regarded as the most distinctive prose satirist of the Romantic period and one of the most perceptive commentators on English intellectual life in his time'. Ours will be the first edition of Peacock’s fiction to appear for more than fifty years, and it will undertake the most sustained effort to date to track down the origins and contexts of his richly allusive style.

Other research interests: mock-epic, Byron, Dickens, German literature, prose style, the novel, practical criticism.

Teaching Areas:

  • Undergraduate: Mods Paper 1 (Introduction to Literary Studies), FHS Paper 5 (1642-1740) and Paper 6 (1740-1832); various special authors and special topics.
  • Graduate: MSt in English, 1660-1830. In 2011-12 I will be convening this MSt strand and teaching the A-course with Dr Matthew Bevis (Keble). Please email me if you have any informal enquiries about the MSt.

I'm happy to consider DPhil applications in any of the areas of research listed above.

Publications:

  • The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, gen. eds. Matthew Bevis and Freya Johnston, 7 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • 'Samuel Johnson's Classicism', in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 3: 1660-1790, eds. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, eds. Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • 'Johnson Personified', in Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum, eds. Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford University Press, 2012)
  • 'Biography, History and Anecdote', in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, vol. 3: The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660-1830, eds. Robert DeMaria, Jr, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (forthcoming)
  • 'Johnson’s Departures', The Transactions of the Johnson Society, 2011 (forthcoming)
  • '"To a Mouse"': Burns, Power and Equality’, in Burns and Other Poets, eds. Fiona Stafford and David Sergeant (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp.53-66
  • 'Correspondence', in Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. Jack Lynch (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.21-28
  • 'Samuel Johnson', in Great Shakespeareans, vol. 1, ed. Claude Rawson (Continuum, 2010), pp.115-59
  • 'Jane Austen's Past Lives', Cambridge Quarterly, 39 (2010), 103-21
  • 'Johnson and Austen', in Samuel Johnson After 300 Years, eds. Greg Clingham and Philip Smallwood (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp.225-45
  • 'Accumulation in Johnson's Dictionary', Essays in Criticism, 57 (2007), 301-24
  • 'Making an Entrance: Frances Burney and Samuel Johnson', in A Celebration of Frances Burney, ed. Lorna Clark (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp.184-95
  • 'William Cowper, The Task' in The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (2006), pp.316-28
  • Samuel Johnson and the Art of Sinking, 1709-1791 (Oxford University Press, 2005)
  • 'Little Lives: An Eighteenth-Century Sub-Genre', Cambridge Quarterly, 32 (2003), 143-60
  • 'Samuel Johnson and Robert Levet', Modern Language Review, 97 (2002), 26-35
  • 'Diminutive Observations in Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland', Age of Johnson, XII (2001), 1-16

Other Information:

I'm a convenor of the Restoration to Reform seminar, which meets on Mondays at 5.15pm on even weeks of term at St Peter's College.

I'm also on the editorial board of the OUP journal, Cambridge Quarterly.

 

College website

Back to Faculty Members