Eighteenth-Century Studies and Romanticism
Research in eighteenth-century studies at Queen Mary coalesces around an intellectual commitment to historicising writing and culture during the period. Individuals within the Department are currently preparing major monographs that consider diverse discursive networks and practices within a range of eighteenth-century communities and spaces: the literary cultures of religious non-conformism; oratory and speaking practices in the House of Commons; the work of professional, metropolitan literary critics. Past publications have addressed the cultural history of the coffee-house; eighteenth-century popular culture; traditions of rhetorical theory and practice; slavery and race; and the political fabric of sentimental fiction. In many instances, this work has contributed to current critical debates concerning both the idea of the public sphere and the history of the book.
The Department’s Romanticists engage with current and historical debates about literary form and theory. Amongst other topics, their important research has examined (and continues to address): historical transformations of the Romantic aesthetic from a European perspective; the deployment of the sublime and the rhetoric of astronomy in urban poetry; the relationship between the poetry of William Blake, and the social, political, and legal discourses of Enlightenment. Other recent monographs have specifically explored the work of a series of important late eighteenth and early nineteenth literary figures: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anna Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Sir Walter Scott.
Staff working in these areas include: