Bevis, Dr Matthew

Job Title: University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Keble
Period/Subject: 18th Century, Romantics, Victorians, 20th Century

Email address: matthew.bevis@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I’ve just finished writing Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, which looks at comedy as a literary genre and as a range of non-literary impulses and events (pantomime, circus, stand-up acts, and other funny business). The book also explores theories of the comic, of laughter, and of humour from the Greeks to the present, featuring discussion of paintings, cartoons, and images from the world of stage and screen.

My current research is mainly in literature from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. I’m editing The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, and have a couple of articles coming out poetic rhythm: ‘Counting Tennyson’ (on natural and metrical numbers) and ‘Byron’s Feet’ (anatomical and prosodic varieties).

In November 2012 I will be giving the British Academy Chatterton Lecture on 'Edward Lear's Lines of Flight'. I recently spoke about Lear's work on Radio 3's programme, The Essay. A recording of the programme can be found here.

I am also the general co-editor, with Freya Johnston (St Anne’s), of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock, 7 vols (CUP). This will be the first edition of Peacock's novels to appear for more than fifty years. A team of scholars from Canada, the USA, and the UK is working on the project and we’re planning a conference to coincide with its completion in 2015 (the bicentenary of the publication of Peacock’s first novel).

Beyond this, I'm writing a book on Wordsworth at Play, and thinking about a longer study called The Sense of Humour: Poetic Comedies from Wordsworth to Auden. In the early 1800s Carlyle claimed that ‘humour is justly regarded as the finest perfection of the poetic genius’, and by the twentieth century T. S. Eliot could seriously claim that ‘from one point of view, the poet aspires to the condition of a music-hall comedian’. I’m interested in how this point of view could have been arrived at, and in what implications it might have for the study of modern poetry and poetics. 

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate: Mods Paper 1 (Introduction to Literary Studies), FHS Paper 6 (1740-1832) and Paper 7 (1830-1910), plus various special authors and special topics.

Graduate: MSt in English, 1660-1830; I co-convene this MSt strand and co-teach the A-course. I also teach on the 1800-1914 MSt, and will be offering a special option in Hilary Term, on Senses of Humour. 

Recent Publications:

‘Byron’s Feet’, in Metre Matters: Verse Cultures of The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Ohio UP, 2011), 78-104

‘Wordsworth at Play’, Essays in Criticism, 61.1 (January 2011), 54-78

‘Tennyson’s Humour’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (OUP, 2009), 231-58

‘Deleecious’ (Hazlitt), The London Review of Books (6 November 2008), 26-8

‘Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (OUP, 2007), 7-33

‘Joyce’s Love Letters’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 44.2 (2007), 354-57

The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007; paperback 2010), pp. 302

Some Versions of Empson (OUP, 2007), ed., pp. 376, including the introduction, ‘Empson in the Round’, 1-20

‘A Knowing Look’, Essays in Criticism, 57.2 (2007), 171-9.

Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), ed., pp. xl + 504

‘Tennyson’s “Roses on the Terrace”: A New Manuscript’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 8.2 (2003), 118-20

‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.2 (Autumn 2003), 577-91

‘Tennyson, Ireland, and “The Powers of Speech”’, Victorian Poetry, 39 (Fall 2001), 345-64

‘Dickens in Public’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (July 2001), 330-52

‘Temporizing Dickens’, Review of English Studies, 52 (May 2001), 171-91

‘Ruskin, Bright, and the Politics of Eloquence’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 27.2 (Fall 2000), 177-90

Other Information:

In 2007, I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize. 

College webpage