Thesis Title: Poetic Revision in the Long Nineteenth Century
Supervisors: Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Professor Matthew Bevis
Research Interests: My thesis examines how the various ways poems come about can be intimately tangled up with what they are about. My intention is not to develop a unifying theory of revision, but by focusing on several writers from the Romantic and Victorian periods, I consider how 'revisionism' provides an apt label to describe a bundle of ideas each writer is working through. As they conceived and returned to their work, I suggest that each poet's processes of revision concentrated inquiries that ranged from broader questions of selfhood and embodiment to more formal concerns with how poems work on the page. This research is funded by an All Souls College-AHRC Graduate Scholarship. I have also published on the relationship between poetic form and philosophy, classical reception, and questions of literary influence.
Selected Publications:
- 'Hopkins's Clouded Judgment', Literary Imagination xxv, 2023
- 'Hopkins Unselved', Victorian Re-Encounters, special issue of Victorian Poetry, eds. D. Gracia and F. McGhee [forthcoming 2023]
- 'Endurance in Pound and Tennyson', Ezra Pound Studies Biennial, eds. R. Bush and A. Araujo (Clemson: Clemson University Press) [forthcoming 2023]
- 'Wallace Stevens, Plato, and the Question of Poetic Truth', Modernism/modernity xxx, 2023
- 'Alexander Pope's Lucretian Vestiges', The Cambridge Quarterly l, 2021
- 'Wordsworth's Self-Composure', English lxx, 2021