Victorian period

Faculty members researching in this area:

Permanent postholders: Dr Matthew Bevis, Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Dr Stefano Evangelista, Dr Patrick Hayes, Dr Michele Mendelssohn, Dr Seamus Perry, Dr Matthew Reynolds, Professor Sally Shuttleworth, Dr John Sloan, and Professor Helen Small.

Research and college staff: Dr Sally Bayley, Dr Faith Binckes, Dr Andrew Blades, Dr Clare Broome Saunders, Professor Stephen Gill, Dr Lyndall Gordon, Ms Rosalyn Gregory, Dr David Grylls, Dr Oliver Herford, Dr Kirsty Martin, Dr James Methven, Dr Sophie Ratcliffe, Dr Rebekah Scott, Dr David Sergeant, Dr Matthew Sperling, Dr Alice Stainer, Dr Bharat Tandon, Dr Julian Thompson, Dr Daniel Tyler, and Dr James Williams.

Our research:

The study of Victorian literature and culture has been a particular strength for many years – appropriately, perhaps, since so many of the major figures of the Victorian period were associated with the University, as students and tutors, including Arnold, Clough, Hopkins, Keble, Lewis Carroll, Newman, Pater, Ruskin, Swinburne, Wilde. Oxford houses many important collections of Victorian material, in the Bodleian and in several college libraries. Among its illustrious dead the Oxford English Faculty can claim some of the most influential critics and scholars of the period, including A.C. Bradley, David Cecil, Humphry House, W.W. Robson, and Paul Turner; and among our Emeritus members, many still active within the Faculty, we are proud to number John Bayley, John Carey, A.O.J. Cockshut, Stephen Gill, Roger Lonsdale, and Stephen Wall. Recent former faculty include Kate Flint, Jo McDonagh, and Jon Mee. Christopher Ricks is currently Professor of Poetry.

Reseach in the Faculty covers the range of Victorian writing. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has published widely on nineteenth century poetry and fiction (Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 2002), with special interests in questions of influence, and the inter-relations between literature, science, and the visual arts in the period. Helen Small, too, has published widely on the connections between literary, scientific, and philosophical writing (Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865, 1996; co-ed., Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, 2003), and has most recently published a study of old age in literature entitled The Long Life (2007), for which she was awarded both the Rose Mary Crawshay and the Truman Capote Prizes. Matthew Reynold’s work has dealt with the historical interpretation of Victorian poetry (The Realms of Verse 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building, 2001) and, more recently, upon questions of literary translation (co-ed., Dante in English, 2005) for the study of which he was awarded a Major Leverhulme Award (2005-8). Seamus Perry’s Alfred Tennyson (2005) places Tennyson in the context of Romantic literature. Nicholas Shrimpton’s research interests focus especially upon Arnold, Ruskin, and aestheticism, though he has published on many topics, including a co-edited volume on Swinburne (The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, 1993); and Stefano Evangelista’s work has also dwelt principally on topics of aestheticism, including the influence of classical and European literatures. Sos Eltis is an expert on the theatre of the period, with a special interest in Wilde, the subject of a monograph (Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde, 1996); and John Sloan has also published on Wilde (2005), as well as landmark books about Davidson (1995) and Gissing (1989).

Textual scholarship has always been a strength of Oxford English, and the Victorian group have published widely in this area: Arnold (Poems, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton); Davidson (Selected Poems and Prose, ed. John Sloan, 1995); Dickens (A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Books, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2006; Great Expectations, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2008; Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small, 1998 and 2003); and George Eliot (The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, ed. Helen Small).

Recent publications:

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002).

--- ed., Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (2008).
--- A.E. Housman’s Rejected Addresses (2007).

Seamus Perry, Alfred Tennyson (2005).

Matthew Reynolds, ed., with Eric Griffiths, Dante in English (2005).
--- The Realms of Verse 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (2001).

Helen Small, The Long Life (2007).
--- ed., with Trudi Tate, Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (2003).
--- ed., The Public Intellectual (2002).

John Sloan, Oscar Wilde (2003)

Other information: