Sergeant, Dr David

Job Title: Junior Research Fellow
College: Somerville
Subject/ Period: Victorian; 20th-21st Century

Email address: david.sergeant@some.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

Late-nineteenth- to twenty-first-century literature, especially the workings of literary form in narrative fiction and poetry. Authors I've written on include Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes and Robert Burns - others in the offing include R. L. Stevenson, Graham Greene and Seamus Heaney. I like to range quite widely ...

Teaching Areas:

Nineteenth-, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature; Introduction to Literary Studies. Undergraduate, masters and doctoral level.

Recent Publications:

'Burns and the Performance of Form' in Burns and Other Poets (co-edited with Fiona Stafford, EUP; Nov 2011) http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0748643575/ref=nosim/?tag=wwweuppublish-21

'Moortown (Diary)', introductory essay on the Ted Hughes Society website  http://www.thetedhughessociety.org/moortowndiary.htm

Talk Like Galileo (Shearsman Books, April 2010) http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2010/sergeant.html

'Kipling's Descriptions,' Essays in Criticism (October 2009)

'Changes in Kipling's Fiction on his Return to Britain,' English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (January 2009)

'Preaching to the Converted: Narrative Communication in Kipling's Letters of Marque and Indian Fiction', Modern Language Review (January 2009)

Other Information:

Work in Progress: I'm currently finishing a book that re-examines Kipling's prose, attempting to situate his politics more precisely, as well as recover an understanding - and so a more solidly grounded appreciation - of his artistry.  This also involves touching on his relationship to modernism, the romance and to history, amongst other things.  An essay on Ted Hughes's 'inner music' should be coming out relatively soon; beyond that, I've got pieces to finish on Seamus Heaney's poetics and the use of space and texture in the work of Emily Dickinson, as well as a larger project looking at the novelist as storyteller through the work of R. L. Stevenson, Graham Greene and Doris Lessing.

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