Romantic period

Faculty members researching in this area:

Permanent postholders: Dr Nicholas Halmi, Professor Lucy Newlyn, Dr Seamus Perry, Professor Fiona Stafford, and Professor Kathryn Sutherland.

Research and college staff: Dr Ruth Abbott, Mr Jamie Baxendine, Dr Andrew Blades, Ms Anna Camilleri, Professor Pamela Clemit, Dr Jenny McAuley, Dr Bharat Tandon, and Dr Susan Valladares.

Our research:

Romantic studies have long been an area of special expertise here, and Oxford academics have played a key role in defining the field, from the pioneering work of Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and A.C. Bradley, through to the twentieth century tradition, both scholarly and critical, of figures such as R.W. Chapman, Helen Darbishire, H.W. Garrod, J.C. Maxwell, A.D. Nuttall, W.W. Robson, and Jonathan Wordsworth. Among our Emeritus members, many still active within the Faculty, we are proud to number John Bayley, Marilyn Butler, Stephen Gill, John Jones, and Roger Lonsdale; and former faculty include Paul Hamilton, Jon Mee, and Duncan Wu.

The research interests of our current faculty range widely through the period. Lucy Newlyn’s early work on the intertextual nature of Romantic writing (Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion, 1986; Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader, 1993) has developed into a wider interest in practices of reading and interpretation (Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, 2000); and her concern to couple the close reading of Romantic works with an attention to their wider cultural contexts is mirrored in the work of several other Faculty members. Tom Paulin’s landmark study of Hazlitt, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998)¸exemplifies this dual approach at its most charismatic. Fiona Stafford’s numerous books and articles place works within the British political and intellectual history of the late eighteenth century, and reach forward to embrace the later history of the islands (The Sublime Savage, 1988; The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin, 1994; Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry, 2000); while Nicholas Halmi (The Genealogy of the Symbol, 2007) and Ben Brice (Coleridge and Scepticism, 2007) both re-locate Romantic literary thinking within the tradition of the long eighteenth century, drawing on philosophy, theology, and anthropology, as well as literary history. Seamus Perry writes about Romantic poetry (Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 1999), and looks forward to its afterlife in Victorian and modern letters (e.g., Alfred Tennyson, 2005). Textual scholarship has long been a special strength at Oxford and it remains central to our activity. Kathryn Sutherland’s international expertise in the field is represented by numerous authoritative editions (Redgauntlet, 1985; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, 1993; Austen’s Mansfield Park, 1996; Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Life Writings, 2002), as well as key interventions in the area, such as Electronic Text, 1997, and Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood, 2005. Other editorial work produced by Faculty members includes Halmi’s contribution to the Norton Coleridge, 2004; Perry’s selected editions of Coleridge’s Notebooks, 2002, and Coleridge on Writing and Writers, 2007; Stafford’s edition of Austen’s Emma, 1996, and Mary Shelley’s Lodore, 1996; and Paulin’s co-edition, with David Chandler, of Hazlitt’s The Fight and Other Writings, 2000.

Recent publications:

Benjamin Brice, Coleridge and Scepticism (2007).

Nicholas Halmi, The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (2007)
--- ed., with Paul Magnuson and Raimonda Modiano, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (2004).
--- ed., Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (2004).
--- ed., with Thomas McFarland, S.T. Coleridge, Opus Maximum (2002).

Lucy Newlyn, ed., with Guy Cuthbertson, Branch-lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (2007).
--- ed., The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (2002)

Tom Paulin, The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer (2008).
--- ed., Thomas Hardy, Poems (2005).
--- ed., with Uttara Natarajan and Duncan Wu, Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays (2005).
--- Crusoe’s Secret: The Aesthetics of Dissent (2005).

Seamus Perry, ed., Coleridge on Writing and Writers (2008).
--- with Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: The Poem and its Illustrators (2006).
--- Alfred Tennyson (2005).

Fiona Stafford, ed., Jane Austen, Emma (2003).
--- Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry: From Burns to Heaney (2000).

Kathryn Sutherland, ed., J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, and Other Family Recollections (2008).
--- ed., with Marilyn Deegan, Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World (2008).
--- with Marilyn Deegan, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (2008).
--- Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (2005).

Other information: