English Literature – (Ph.D.)

Contents

The following summary indicates our principal areas of research expertise. Please view the Department of English website for further details of possible research topics and staff contact details.
Our work in Medieval English (for example, Old English, Chaucer, Langland, the Vernon manuscript) extends through medieval literature into concerns with editing, print production, bibliography, manuscript studies, and non-manuscript verbal cultures of the Middle Ages; and also with relations between medieval verbal and visual cultures. In the Early Modern andShakespeare area (for example, Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Daniel, Donne), our focus on drama extends into the reception of the dramatists in later periods, running alongside work on the wider literature of the Early Modern period and on cultures of manuscript and print. In Restoration, 18th century and Romantics (for example, Milton, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Coleridge) we focus on reading literary works in their historical and cultural contexts, with specific interests in the editing of texts, in language and lexicography, in reception of the medieval, and in gender.

Our 19th and 20th century research (for example, Wilde, Woolf, Zadie Smith) has a particular focus on the periods 1830–1940 (especially Victorianism, Aestheticism and Modernism, periodisation and historiography); and Postmodernism, Cultural Theory and Film (especially psychoanalysis, nationhood, space and place, Black British and British Asian writing, gender and sexualities, and literary and cultural studies). The research themes of materiality of the text (for example, textual editing, history of the book) and gender (for example, women writers, relevant theoretical approaches) can be pursued across all these periods.

Our staff work on a variety of other areas, and recent examples include: Browne, Marvell, Suckling, and 17th-century women’s writing; Judith Cowper and Mary Leapor; Johnson’s Dictionary online (a fully annotated critical edition); Henry James Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arnold Wesker, J G Ballard, and Kazuo Ishiguro.