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Professor of Romantic Literature, University of Sheffield

My interests lie in literature published between the 1760s and 1820s, and my publications have come broadly from the interactions between the Gothic and Romantic modes during these decades, both in Britain and in France. In 2013, for example, I published Britain, France and the Gothic: The Import of Terror with Cambridge University Press, and there I investigated the roles played by translation, adaptation and silent plagiarism between the Gothic and Romantic modes in Britain and France. The book was shortlisted for the Allan Lloyd Smith memorial prize for Gothic Fiction in 2015, and won an honourable mention.

My new book Mary Shelley explores the continuing fascination with the aesthetics of terror and horror that pervade the works of Mary Shelley from Frankenstein in 1818 to the later novels and short stories that she published in the 1810s, 1820s and even 30s. By demonstrating the shared aesthetics of terror and horror that range across her body of work, I hope that this book will show the agility, discursive breadth and continuing preoccupations that characterise Mary Shelley’s writing throughout her career. The book was published in January 2018, and you can see its cover here. http://www.uwp.co.uk/book/mary-shelley-hardback/

Other publications include the co-edited Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2014) (both with Dale Townshend). I am also currently co-editing a three volume Cambridge History of the Gothic with Professors Dale Townshend and Catherine Spooner.

I am also currently writing another monograph, entitled Fostering Romanticism which addresses the wealth and considerable weight of poetry, drama and prose published between the 1760s and 1820s that focusses upon the foster or adoptive parent. This research was funded by means of a Leverhulme fellowship in 2016-17, and should, I hope, be completed by Autumn 2018.

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of English Literature, University of Sheffield