Here at K-SAA we love a good book. Luckily for us, so does Sarah Dent, who has reviewed for the blog Emily Brand’s game-changing family study of the Byrons. Here Sarah gives us an insight into the exploits of Lord Byron’s ancestors, including naval heroics, advice for young ladies, and rebellion… George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron was one of the most notorious literary figures of the early nineteenth century, known for his poetry, love affairs, adventures in Europe and flamboyant lifestyle. However, he was far from being the first Byron to be associated with scandal. In The Fall of the House of Byron, historian Emily Brand traces the history of Byron’s ancestors in the eighteenth century, focusing primarily on the generation of William, 5th Baron Byron (the poet’s great-uncle) and his siblings. As the book’s title suggests, the key thread running through this story is how the Byron dynasty fell from fortune through a combination of scandalous behaviour, financial ruin and . . .
We hope you have enjoyed the various interviews presented in the K-SAA’s ‘What Are You Reading?’ series so far. Today we are delighted to continue the series with a fascinating response from Deborah Lam. Deborah is a PhD researcher and Associate Tutor at the University of Bristol, and she explains her current project: My thesis attempts to define an aesthetics of excess in the work of Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, and explores forms of copiousness from poetry to visual art. Currently, I am convening the Poetry module for the English Literature and Community Engagement BA. Before coming to Bristol, I read English and Related Literature at the University of York, and then for an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, during which my dissertation examined visions, optical phenomena and phenomenology in Coleridge’s writing. In these posts we hope to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic- . . .
Professor Nicola Watson on The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums We’ve been delighted to have so many excellent contributors to our ‘What Are You Reading?’ series on the K-SAA Blog. Today, we present a special Q&A – an interview with Nicola Watson of the Open University to mark the publication of her monograph The Author’s Effects: On Writer’s House Museums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Nicola Watson is a specialist in the literature and culture of the Romantic period. Her research focuses on authorial afterlives and the associated histories of literary tourism, literary commemoration, and the literary museum. She is the PI of the AHRC-funded project DREAMing Romantic Europe. Her latest publication, The Author’s Effects, is the only book about the emergence of the writer’s house museum in the Romantic period as a distinct cultural formation and convention. It considers the writer’s house museum as a form of literary biography crucial to the construc . . .
We’re excited to continue our “What are you reading?” series by presenting an interview with Chris Washington, Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University. His first monograph, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene, was published by the University of Toronto Press in September 2019. With Anne McCarthy he is co-editor of the collection Romanticism and Speculative Realism (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has published essays in Romantic Circles Praxis, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, Literature Compass, and has several more forthcoming in journals and collections. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume of essays, “Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene,” for Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons. He is currently working on two monographs, “#OccupyRomanticism: Revolutionary Climate Protest from Then to Now,” and “Quantum Romanticism: Life, Love, and Politics in . . .
Leading on from our interview with Graham Henderson last week, we’re continuing our ‘What Are You Reading?’ series with an interview with John Worthen – the author of Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Critical Biography (2019), which was one of the texts that Graham was reading! John Worthen taught at Downing College, Cambridge; University of Kent; and University College of Swansea before becoming Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He has written prolifically on Romantic and Modernist writers. Some of his monographs include The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001); D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005); Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007); T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography (2009); An Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2013); William Wordsworth: A Critical Biography (2014); and, most recently, a fantastic (and highly recommended) seminal work entitled Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Cri . . .
We are delighted to continue our ‘What are you reading?’ series by presenting an interview with Graham Henderson. Graham is the President and CEO of Music Canada, and the creator of ‘The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley’, a website devoted to celebrating Shelley’s life and works, especially his radical writings and ideas; as the mission statement suggests, Graham’s work promotes the fact that “Shelley has the power to enthrall, thrill and inspire. His poetry changed the world and can do so again“. Graham is on the Board of the Keats-Shelley Association of America. You can find him on Twitter (Shelley and personal) and we recommend you visit ‘The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley’ Facebook page, too. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? Obviously, for me as a PB Shelley scholar, the most important book I am in the midst of is John Worthen’s new biography of PBS. (Worthen will also feature in this series soon! -ed.)I could tr . . .
We are pleased to continue our ‘What are you reading?’ series by presenting an interview with Dr. Padma Rangarajan (University of California, Riverside). Dr. Rangarajan is a recipient of the K-SAA Pforzheimer Research Grant and is the author of Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (Fordham UP, 2014). Her essays have been published in ELH, Romanticism, English Language Notes, and Nineteenth-Century Studies. She is currently at work on Thug Life: The British Empire and the Birth of Terrorism, a book-length study of terrorism in the colonial literary imagination. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? I’m reading Richard Bourke’s Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, Christopher Bundock’s Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism, Sunil Agnani’s Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism, and . . .
We continue our ‘What Are You Reading?’ series by presenting an interview with Dr. Kacie Wills. Dr. Wills is a recipient of the K-SAA Pforzheimer Research Grant and recently received her PhD from the University of California, Riverside, on Fancy, Spectacle, and the Materiality of the Romantic Imagination in Pacific Exploration Culture. She will be joining Illinois College as an Assistant Professor of British Literature this August. What’s the critical book that figured most significantly in your PhD thesis/first monograph/most recent monograph? Judith Pascoe’s The Hummingbird Cabinet: a Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors figured significantly in my PhD thesis. In addition to providing a model for engaging scholarly writing that I try to emulate, Pascoe’s work was foundational to the ways I think about Romantic collecting and the importance of material culture in shaping the Romantic imagination. Additionally, Adriana Craciun and Simon Schaffer’s The Material Cu . . .
Today we continue our ‘What are you reading?’ series by presenting an interview with Tricia Matthew, Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. Tricia Matthew is the co-editor of a special issue for the Romantic Pedagogy Commons entitled Novel Prospects: Teaching Romantic Era Fiction, editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), and is currently writing a monograph about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist literature. What new studies of Romantic literature are you reading right now? I’m currently reading The Illustrated Slave by Martha J. Cutter (Georgia UP, 2017), Contested Bodies by Sasha Turner (Pennsylvania, 2017), Wollstonecraft’s Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes (Routledge, 2016), and Annie Persons’ recent essay in Women’s Writing “Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and Human C . . .
Welcome to a new series of posts on the K-SAA Blog entitled ‘What are you reading?’ We want to use this space to support and encourage discussions relating to the latest Romantic-period scholarship, especially those publications (online and in print) concerned with the second generation of Romantic writers: Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, and their circles. Initially we will be asking Romanticism scholars about new and recent work that they might have encountered that will be of interest to our followers, and then we’ll give them the chance to comment on some of their favorite studies in general. We also want to know about what they might be reading more broadly – contemporary poetry, perhaps, or a new novel… Our next interviewee is Nikki Hessell, Associate Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington. Her most recent monograph is Romantic Literature and the Colonised World: Lessons from Indigenous Translations (Palsgrave 2018). She is also the author of Literar . . .
