Perry, Dr Seamus

Job Title: CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Balliol
Period/ Subject: 20th Century/Victorians/ Romantics/18th Century

Email address: seamus.perry@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My interests are principally in the field of English Romantic poetry and thought, especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in post-Romantic English poetry, especially Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, Larkin, and their circles. I also have an interest in the modern history of criticism, reflected in articles on A.C. Bradley, William Empson, F.W. Bateson, and M.H. Abrams. I am co-editor, with Christopher Ricks, of the journal Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (OUP), and the general editor of the new series, 21st-Century Oxford Authors (OUP).

Work for the next few years revolves around two main areas. The first is a study of some continuities in nineteenth and early twentieth century poetry and poetics, placing them within principally the context of social thought and political philosophy. Associated with this is an edition of Arnold for the 21st Century Oxford Authors, and editorial work on Empson's study of pastoral.  The second is an edition of Coleridge's poems for Longman.

Teaching Areas:

Undergraduate:  English Literature, 1660- present.

Graduate: English Romanticism, Victorian poetry, 20C poetry.  Doctoral topics recently and currently supervised include: Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, manuscript culture in early nineteenth century England.

Recent Publications:

‘Auden's Forms’; in W.H. Auden in Context, ed. Anthony Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.

‘Was Coleridge Green?’; in Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, ed. John Rignall (Farnham: Ashgate), forthcoming.

`So Striking a Miss-hit' (Hardy); Times Literary Supplement 5635 (1 April 2011), 8-9. (ISSN 0307661.)

‘S.T. Coleridge’; in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 308-27. (ISBN 978-0-521-69703-3.)

‘Are we there yet?’ (Tennyson); London Review of Books 33.2 (20 January 2011), 13-16. (ISSN 0260-9592.) 

‘Romantic Poetry: An Overview; in The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 418-39.  (ISBN 987-0-521-88306-1.) 

‘Look on the Bright Side’ (Anna Letitia Barbauld); London Review of Books 32:4 (25 February 2010), 19-22. (ISSN 0260-9592.)

‘Auden Unparadised. Chatterton Lecture on Poetry’; Proceedings of the British Academy 162 (2009), 69-91.  (ISSN 0068 1202).

'Not unnoting all things' (Hardy); in Times Literary Supplement 5564 (20 November 2009), 7-8.  (ISSN 0307661.)

Co-editor, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Tennyson Among the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Including: ‘Betjeman’s Tennyson’, 409-26. (ISBN 978-0199557134.)

‘Coleridge’s Literary Influence’; in Frederick Burwick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 661-676.  (ISBN 978 0 19 922953 6.)

‘Wordsworth’s Trouble’; London Review of Books 30:24 (18 December, 2008), 26-8. (ISSN 0260-9592.)

‘Coleridge and Eliot’; in James Vigus and Jane Wright (ed.), Coleridge’s Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 224-251.  (ISBN 978 0 00828 1.)

Editor, Coleridge’s Responses. Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible and Nature. Volume I: Coleridge on Writing and Writers. (Coleridge’s Responses: General Editor, John Beer. London: Continuum, 2008).  Pp. xvii+605.  (ISBN 987-0-8264-8372-0.)

‘Tennyson and the Legacies of Romantic Art’; Romanticism 14.1 (2008) [‘Romantic Legacies’ special number, ed. Michael O’Neill], 1-12.  (ISSN 1354-991X.)

‘Coleridge, Christ, and Contradiction in Empson’; in Matthew Bevis (ed.), Some Versions of Empson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 104-30.  (ISBN 0 19 928636 2.)

‘Coleridge in England’; in Elinor Shaffer and Edoardo Zuccato (eds.), Coleridge in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007), 14-26. (ISBN 9 780 82646845 1.)

‘Joy Perplexed: Optimism and Complication in Wordsworth, T.H. Green and A.C. Bradley’ (‘Commentary’); Times Literary Supplement 5389 (14 July 2006), 13-15. (ISSN 0307661.)

‘Self-Management’ (Southey); London Review of Books 28.2 (26 January, 2006), 18-21. (ISSN 0260-9592.)

Alfred Tennyson (Plymouth: Northcote House / The British Council, 2005; Writers and their Work series: General Editor, Isobel Armstrong).  Pp. xviii + 190.   (ISBN 0 7463 1107 9 hardback; 0 7463 0919 8 paperback.)

Other Information:

Outside Oxford, I am a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Institute of English Studies in the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of London.

I was born in Aldershot, a military town best known to literature through its memorialisation in poems by John Betjeman. After local state schools I came to Oxford and took my undergraduate (1989) and graduate (1995) degrees at St Catherine's College. I was Oakeshott Junior Research Fellow, Lincoln College, 1995-8; and then moved to the University of Glasgow for five years, first as Lecturer and then Reader in English Literature. I came back to Oxford as a Fellow of Balliol and a Lecturer in the English Faculty in 2003.

Fellow of the English Association, elected 2005.

Balliol College web-site.

Essays in Criticism web-site

Wordsworth Trust web-site

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