Long nineteenth century

Three major themes run throughout our work. The first is the concept of authorship, considering how writers in the nineteenth century saw their own role as authors. Case studies within the department, linked to major new editorial projects, include work on Charles Lamb, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde and Henry James, as well as work on authors’ networks and correspondence across the century.

The second is the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Work at this interface within the department runs from the eighteenth century to the present. In the nineteenth century it centres in particular on the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, looking at their poetry and art criticism alongside their paintings, sculpture and design.

The third strand is research into the relationship between literature and science. Here our work includes work on literary and scientific institutions, from museums to the periodical press, on literary forms including poetry and science fiction, and on scientific theories, including Darwinian and non-Darwinian theories of evolution. 

Researchers

• Dr Louise Curran - Material forms and textual meanings
• Dr John Fagg - American art and literature
• Dr Richard Fallon - Interactions and overlaps between literature and science
• Dr Jessica Fay - Aesthetics, landscape poetry, and narrative form
• Professor Alexandra Harris - Landscape, locality and the presence of the past
• Dr Oliver Herford - British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James
• Dr Andrew Hodgson - Voice, influence, and achievement in English poetry and in particular the poetry of the Romantic period
• Professor John Holmes - Scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts
• Professor Tom Lockwood - Early modern and into the Romantic periods
• Professor Deborah Longworth - Nineteenth and twentieth century women writers
• Dr Rebecca N Mitchell - Victorian literature and culture
• Dr Sebastian Mitchell - Romantic literature and culture, and utopian writing
• Dr Daniel Moore - Nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual culture
• Dr Jimmy Packham - American Gothic literature and maritime writing
• Dr Jack Quin - Poetry and sculpture
• Dr Matthew Ward - British Romanticism
• Dr Jarad Zimbler - Decolonization

Major publications

• Bulaitis, Zoe, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (2020)
• Dickson, Melissa, Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019)
• Dobson, Eleanor, Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (2020)
• Harris, Alex, Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies (2015)
• Herford, Oliver, Henry James's Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings, 1890-1915 (2016)
• Hodgson, Andrew, The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney: Lyric Individualism (2019)
• Holmes, John, The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018)
• Mitchell, Rebecca, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (2015)
• Shaikh, Fariha, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art (2018)
• Tattersdill, Will, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (2016)

Projects

• Symbiosis
• Arts of Place
• Completing the Works of Oscar Wilde 
• Building the Book of Nature

Find out more

• Research in English
• Doctoral research
• Research seminars

OUR RESEARCHERS TALK ABOUT THEIR WORK: