Andrea Selleri

I joined the Department in September 2020, having completed my BA and MA degrees at the University of Trieste and my PhD at the University of Warwick. I work primarily on literary history, especially the intersections between British literature, criticism and philosophy in the long nineteenth century. Areas of reasonable competence include modern literatures in English, French, Spanish and Italian, and some areas of intellectual history and philosophy, especially aesthetics.

My main research project to date has concerned the more or less subterranean history of the idea of the author between Romanticism and Formalism, on which topic I am completing my first monograph. Connecting research into little-known essays and reviews in periodicals with a study of the reception of various literary works, I show that (1) among Victorian critics the Romantic idea that poets express their soul through poetry developed into a more eclectic concern with the concrete circumstances of writers’ lives, which extended from poets to dramatists and novelists; (2) that with the development of alternative aesthetic ideals over the period, especially among Aestheticist writers at odds with the prevalent morality, the method showed its latent problematicality; (3) that this tension resulted in the articulation, both explicitly and de facto through form, of a proto-formalist aesthetics on the part of writers such as Pater, Swinburne and Wilde. Most of the essays listed below sprang, more or less directly, from this project.

I am also interested in the relations between literature and philosophy in various historical periods, including the present; in particular, how the ideas in one field change when confronted with the other. For example, the essay collection I co-edited for Palgrave (the offshoot of a conference I organised at Warwick) tries to sketch some of the possibilities of interdisciplinary research today. A newer project focuses on the problem of free will in nineteenth-century fiction, my ELH article on Wilde being the first publication arising from it. I have also recently completed work on a collaborative project about the interactions between literature and philosophy in the long nineteenth century, which has resulted in a three-volume edited compilation of mostly little-known sources, with annotations and commentary, published by Routledge in 2024.

In autumn 2024 I am teaching ELIT 227 (Poetry and Poetics) and the new elective ELIT 459 (Thinking with Poetry). At Bilkent I have also taught ELIT 152 (Research and Writing Techniques), ELIT 366 (Victorian Literature), ELIT 392 (Literary Theory) and the electives ELIT 417 (Aesthetics and Aestheticism), ELIT 426 (A Literary History of Madness) and ELIT 458 (Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture).

With Dr Patrick Fessenbecker, Dr Iris Vidmar Jovanović and Dr Atti Viragh I coordinate the Philosophy and Literature Colloquia series (see here for current and past events). I also serve as a review editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture, and take care of the departmental website.

My office is G-212/A. My office hours are Tuesday 17:30 – 18:20 and Friday 17:30 – 18:20.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Critical edition

  • Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Volume 3: The Later Victorian Period, 1870-1910 (London: Routledge, 2024), xliii + 328 pp. Link

Edited essay collection

  • (with Philip Gaydon) Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), xv + 290 pp. Link

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • ‘The Roots of Wilde’s Tuberose’. Notes and Queries 71.1 (March 2024), 113-15. Link
  • ‘Free Will’. Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (special issue Fall 2023), 411-14. Link
  • ‘Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry’. Victorian Poetry 61.2 (Summer 2023), 187-204. Link
  • ‘An American Source for Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance’. ANQ 36.2 (2023; online publication in July 2021), 227-30. Link
  • ‘Swinburne’s Boyishness’. Journal of Victorian Culture 27.1 (January 2022), 135-49. Link
  • ‘Oscar Wilde and the Freedom of the Will’, English Literary History 88.1 (Spring 2021), 167-97. Link
  • ‘Authorship’, Victorian Literature and Culture 46.3 (special issue Fall/Winter 2018), 580-83. Link
  • ‘Oscar Wilde on the Theory of the Author’, Philosophy and Literature 42.1 (April 2018), 49-66. Link
  • ‘The “Hermeneutic Imperative” and Victorian Word Portraits’, Victorian Periodicals Review 50.2 (Summer 2017), 384-97. Link
  • ‘Possible Echoes of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in Oscar Wilde’s Works’, Notes and Queries 64.1 (March 2017), 137-9. Link
  • ‘Swinburne, His Critics, and the Idea of the Dramatic’, Review of English Studies 67 (June 2016), 538-57. Link
  • ‘Oscar Wilde and Authorialism’, Authorship 3.2 (Autumn 2014), 18 pp. Link
  • ‘Oscar Wilde’s Debt to Edward Dowden’, Notes and Queries 61.1 (March 2014), 101-2. Link
  • ‘Authorship, Authenticity and the Perceptual / Non-Perceptual Divide’, Journal of Literary Theory 7.2 (Autumn 2013), 154-66. Link

Book chapters

  • ‘Introduction: Literature and Philosophy in the “Long-Late-Victorian” Period’ in Andrea Selleri (ed.) Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Volume 3: The Later Victorian Period, 1870-1910 (London: Routledge, 2024), pp. xxvii-xliii. Link
  • (with Philip Gaydon) ‘Introduction’ in Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon (eds.) Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1-14. Link
  • ‘Literary Examples in Analytic Aesthetics: The Claim of the Particular’ in Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon (eds.) Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 207-23. Link

Selected reviews

  • Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Notes and Queries 68.2 (June 2021), 240-41. Link
  • Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm (eds.), Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Notes and Queries 66.3 (September 2019), 483-84. Link
  • Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Notes and Queries 63.2 (June 2016), 329-30. Link
  • Anthony J. Cascardi, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Notes and Queries 62.4 (December 2015), 643-4. Link
  • Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Notes and Queries 62.1 (March 2015), 178-9. Link