Research - English Department

Colleagues have published and edited works on a wide range of authors and areas, such as Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Rochester, Sterne, Handel, Cowper, Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Gaskell, James, Conrad, Ford, Joyce, Beckett, Zbigniew Herbert, Fowles, Burroughs, Pinter, Toni Morrison, DeLillo, literature and the Great Famine, Romanticism, Victorian Sensation fiction, poetic influence, film, translation, the short-short story, South African fiction and poetry, drugs and addiction, and 9/11 and terrorism.

Recent and forthcoming publications by tutors on the Creative Writing programmes include short story collections, novels, volumes of poetry, writers’ guides, and student textbooks, as well as academic essays and critical studies.

Continuum’s Character Studies series and its forthcoming book, Studying English Literature, were born from the Department’s desire to help new university students, wherever they are studying, get up to speed with degree-level study.

The Department hosts a lively research seminar, with colleagues and postgraduate students presenting works in progress. Current research interests among colleagues include: Anthony Trollope’s Irish fiction; women and portable property in the Victorian novel; cosmopolitanism and orientalism in nineteenth-century Irish poetry; P. B. Shelley’s ideas of evil; literature and authenticity; Ford Madox Ford’s poetry; representations of the female body in modern literary and visual culture; and the liberal South African novel. Several colleagues are also working on novels, short stories, and poetry collections.

Certain colleagues hold key roles for various literary societies and periodicals, notably as President of the Margaret Cavendish Society, Secretary of the Ford Madox Ford Society and Editor of the Ford Madox Ford Society Newsletter. Two colleagues are the founders and editors of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.

Recently graduated PhD students have written theses on ‘The Fiction and Fictionalising of William Carleton’, ‘The Relevance of the Ideology of Separate Spheres in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Literature’, and ‘Gender and Space in Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Plays’. Current PhD students are researching ‘Images of the Witch in Victorian Literature and Culture’, ‘Victorian Women Writers and the Magazine Story’, ‘Appropriations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’, ‘The Reworking of Myth in Modern Literature’, ‘The Historical Novel’, and ‘Gender and Sexuality in Sarah Waters’.