Next Wednesday I’ll be interviewing the wonderful poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie for the Centre for the History of the Book annual public lecture. Kathleen Jamie is one of the most important and original writers of poetry and prose working in Scotland today. Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award, a Forward Poetry Prize, …
Blog for The Romanticism Blog at the Wordsworth Trust
I wrote a blog about my new book What the Victorians Made of Romanticism for the Romanticism Blog run by the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. In it, I describe some of the main arguments of the book, especially as they relate to William Wordsworth. You can read the blog here. You can buy the book …
Shelley’s Long Poems in Victorian Anthologies
‘Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning’ accepted for RES
My article ‘Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning’ has been accepted for publication in the Review of English Studies. The beginnings of Byron’s longer poems reveal a number of anxieties about the poetic act of beginning. He dealt with these concerns in several ways: revising opening lines, using translations from other poets to begin his …
World Book Day Lecture
I’m very happy to have been invited to give the World Book Day Lecture at the University of Otago in New Zealand next March. World Book Day next year is on 1 March. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to talk about yet, but I’m planning to say something about the things we do …
Byron and the Difficulty of Beginning Lecture in Melbourne
Collaborative Authorship
Passing Time in Victorian Illustrations to Romantic Poetry
Blackwood’s Bicentenary Conference
Nick Mason and I organised a two-day conference to mark the bicentenary of the founding of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It was attended by around 40 scholars from the UK, North America, Europe and Asia. There were great plenary lectures by Joanne Shattock and Mark Parker. We hope that the conference will help to focus research …
BARS Conference, University of York
I’m off to the British Association of Romantic Studies conference at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York. This is the leading academic conference in the UK for studies of Romantic literature and the Romantic period. The topic this year is ‘Romantic Improvement’. I’ll be talking about the ways in which Victorian preachers and …