- Home
- About the Faculty
- Introduction
- History
- Development Activities
- Our Research
- Externally Funded Projects
- Medieval
- Early Modern
- 18th Century
- Romantic period
- Victorian period
- 20th - 21st Century
- American Literature
- Postcolonial and world literatures
- Language and Linguistics
- Film and media
- Textual scholarship, bibliography, and book history
- Contemporary Writers at Oxford
- Travel Cultures
- Faculty Members
- Administrative Staff
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Research Centres and other Faculty Websites
- English Faculty Library
- Giving
- Prospective Undergraduates
- Prospective Graduates
- For Current Students & Staff
- News & Events
- Contact Us
Whitworth, Dr Michael
Job Title: University Lecturer in 20th Century Literature and Tutorial Fellow
College: Merton
Period/ Subject: 20th/ 21st Century
Email address: michael.whitworth@ell.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
I am currently working to complete an edition of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day for Cambridge University Press; this will be the first scholarly edition to include full textual apparatus, and it will also have thorough annotations. I expect to write two or more articles drawing on the work for this edition. When the edition of Night and Day is complete, I will be preparing an edition of Woolf’s Orlando for Oxford World’s Classics.
In the immediate future I will also be resuming work on my project on science, poetry, and specialization in the 1920s and 1930s, which I expect to lead to a series of journal articles or a monograph. This project considers the ways in which poets use scientific diction and imagery in their poetry, both as part of the revival of metaphysical poetry in the period and more broadly. It will include work on Herbert Read, Michael Roberts, William Empson, C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Hugh MacDiarmid.
In the longer future, I hope to work on science in later twentieth-century poetry, especially that in the late modernist tradition; and to write on questions of literature and value. I also have plans for annotated editions of poetry and letters by writers studied as part of the science, poetry, and specialization project.
Teaching Areas:
Modern Literature, Victorian Literature, Introduction to Literary Studies, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad.
Recent Publications:
Books
Reading Modernist Poetry. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
(co-editor with Anna Snaith) Locating Woolf: The Politics of Space and Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 978-0-230-50073-0.
(ed.) Modernism: A Guide to Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. ISBN 0-631-23077-7 (hbk.)
Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-280234-8.
Einstein's Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-818640-1.
Other Publications
‘The Use of Science in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Later Poetry.’ The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, ed. Margery Palmer McCulloch and Scott Lyall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pp.97-110.
‘Modernist Poetry and Science.’ Teaching Modernist Poetry, ed. Nicola Marsh and Peter Middleton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
‘Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Modernity.’ Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Sellers. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
'Forms of Culture in Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Etika Preobrazhennavo Erosa.' International Journal of Scottish Literature, no.5 (Autumn/Winter 2009). [online at www.ijsl.stir.ac.uk.]
‘Enemies of Cant: The Athenaeum and The Adelphi’. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 364-388.
‘Culture and Leisure in Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach.”’ Scottish Studies Review, 9 no.1 (late Spring 2008): 123-43.
‘Hugh MacDiarmid and Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary.’ Notes and Queries 55 (Mar. 2008): 78-80.
‘A Previously Unrecorded Review by Virginia Woolf’ and edited text of ‘Some Poetic Plays’ by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf Bulletin (Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain), no.27 (Jan. 2008): 12-20.
‘Three Prose Sources for Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach.”’ Notes and Queries 54 (June 2007): 175-77.
‘Herbert Read and the New Metaphysical Poetry.' Rereading Read: New Views on Herbert Read, ed. Michael Paraskos. London: Freedom Press, 2007.
‘Logan Pearsall Smith and Orlando. ' Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 598-604.
‘Eliot, Schiff, and Einstein.' Notes and Queries 47 (2000): 336-37.
Other Information:
After secondary education in Oxfordshire, I read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. At sixth-form college I had studied Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics alongside English; this background fuelled my interest as an undergraduate in Darwinism and Victorian literature, which in turn prompted my research work. My D.Phil. research, also undertaken at Oxford, concerned the reception of the new physics, particularly relativity theory, among British modernist writers. I taught at the University of Wales, Bangor, from 1995 to 2005, and in 2001 organized the 11th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. I returned to Oxford in 2005 as University Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature and Tutorial Fellow of Merton College.
My research is concerned with modernism, modernity, and modernist writers. I am still actively researching the relations of literature and science. A Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2005-07) enabled me to examine the use of scientific discourse by poets in the early twentieth century in the context of increasing disciplinary specialization. T. S. Eliot's prose is an important reference point; poets considered include Herbert Read, Hugh MacDiarmid, Michael Roberts, William Empson, C. Day Lewis, and W. H. Auden. I am co-founder of the British Society for Literature and Science and serve on its committee; I also help organize a literature and science seminar in Oxford.
Writing Virginia Woolf (2005) broadened my interest in the contextualization of literature to include social and political contexts. My edition of Woolf's Night and Day (for CUP) will build on these interests. My interest in publishing history began in relation to popular science publishing, and was extended in my research on Woolf. I am also working on a descriptive bibliography of Herbert Read, and have further interests in modernist periodicals and in literary anthologies. From 2008-2011 I was an editor of the Review of English Studies, and its reviews editor.
My college teaching covers the Victorian period and twentieth centuries. My faculty lectures and seminars concentrate on twentieth-century topics, including modernist poetry and Virginia Woolf. I regularly teach on the M.St., and currently offer a 'C' option on late modernist poetry in America and Britain. Current and recent D.Phil. supervision includes work on literature, technology, and science in both the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, theories of modernism, and concepts of authorship. I would welcome inquiries from prospective D.Phil. students in these areas and those interested in other aspects of twentieth-century literature.
Back to Faculty Members