Our department is an active center of academic research, with faculty involved in a variety of research projects across many periods and forms of literature. You can find out more about the research interests and publications of individual department members by visiting our People page. Below are a few examples of some of the recent and ongoing research activities within the department:
Forthcoming work
Ivana Bičak, “From Praising the Remedy to Eulogising the Patient: Cristóbal de Castillejo’s Satire of Guaiac in Early Modern Spain.” Social History of Medicine (forthcoming in print; online version available at https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad072).
Ayşe Çelikkol, “Historical Ecologies in Heterodox Economic Thought and Literary Realism of the 1860s,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1860s, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Andrea Selleri, ed. Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Volume 3: The Later Victorian Period, 1870-1910, forthcoming from Routledge, May 2024.
Atti Viragh and Marion Thain, eds. Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
Atti Viragh, “Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Circle of Attention,” in Close Reading as Attentional Practice, ed. Ewan Jones and Marion Thain, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
Recent articles and book chapters
Ceylan Köşker Bevington, “In Time of Disturbance: Political Dissonance and Subversion in Violet Fane’s Contributions to the Lady’s Realm,” in The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period, ed. (Edinburgh UP, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474433921
Ayşe Çelikkol, “World Ecology in Martineau’s and Gaskell’s Colonial Pastorals,” Journal of Victorian Culture 25.1 (2020), 110-25. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz055
Ayşe Çelikkol, “Capitalism in the Pastoral Mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 42.5 (2020), 523-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2020.1816084
Ayşe Çelikkol, “Secularity and the Limits of Reason in Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ and ‘Hymn of Man’,” Victorian Literature and Culture 49.2 (2021), 301-24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150319000366
Andrea Selleri, “Oscar Wilde and the Freedom of the Will,” ELH 88.1 (2021), 167-97. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2021.0001
Andrea Selleri, “Swinburne’s Boyishness,” Journal of Victorian Culture 27.1 (2022), 135-49. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac001
Andrea Selleri, “An American Source for Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance,” ANQ 36.2 (2023), 27-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2021.1922073
Andrea Selleri, “Free Will,” Victorian Literature and Culture 51.3 (2023), 411-14. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150323000323
Andrea Selleri, “Ghostly Selves in Augusta Webster’s Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 61.2 (2023), 187-204. https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a907679
Atti Viragh, “‘The Keener Touch’: Walter Pater and the Hermeneutic Scene of Contact,” ELH 89.1 (2022), 185-213. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2022.0007
Jonathan Williams, “Thomas Gray’s Elegy and the Politics of Memorialization,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (2018), 653-72. https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2018.0026
Jonathan Williams, “Melancholy’s Ends: Thomson’s Reveries,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 64.1 (2022), 53-76. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0002
Jonathan Williams, “Rasselas, Egypt, and Cosmopolitan Oblivion,” in Discourses of Travel, Exploration, and European Power in Egypt from 1750 to 1956, ed. Valerie Kennedy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023): 16-30.
Timothy Wright, “Ruined time and post-revolutionary allegory in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Small Things,” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 45.2 (2019), 198-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2019.1619274
Timothy Wright, “Melancholy Freedom: Movement and Stasis in Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015),” Journal of African Cinemas 11.3 (2019), 207-24. https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00017_1
Timothy Wright, “Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s Mutational Aesthetics,” Research in African Literatures 50.2 (2019), 142-57. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.10
Books
Ceylan Köşker Bevington, Violet Fane: The Literary Identities of the 19th-century Poet and Novelist (Edward Everett Root, 2021).
Ayşe Çelikkol, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2011).
Gül Kurtuluş, Stereoscopic London: Plays of Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero in the 1890s (Peter Lang, 2020).
Gül Kurtuluş, Convention and Contravention in Ben Jonson’s Three Comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair (Peter Lang, 2022).
Stein Haugom Olsen and Anders Pettersson, eds. Why Literary Studies: Raisons D’être of a Discipline (Novus, 2011).
Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon, eds. Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (Palgrave, 2016).
Ongoing work
The Typology of the New Woman. Dr. Ceylan Köşker Bevington is currently working on a comparative study that examines the differing ways in which the New Woman is represented in both British and American periodicals of the nineteenth century. Taking as its starting point the prevalent conflicting images of the New Woman as a utopian ‘political woman of the coming century’ on the one hand and that of her as a ‘mannish brute’ representative of ‘a dystopic vision of a society gone wrong’ on the other, the article aims to define a typology of the New Woman that acknowledges the numerous gradations of depiction that exists between these polar extremes and offer more nuanced definitions of the New Woman than have been previously established.
Rural Capitalism and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. With the aim of putting New Economic Criticism in dialogue with ecocriticism, Ayşe Çelikkol’s book project discusses literary responses to the increasing commercialization of the countryside in Britain. Examining poems, novels, and travel writing by authors such as William Cobbett, John Clare, and Thomas Hardy, the project traces those insights about rural capitalism that crystallize in literary forms and techniques from parataxis to realist mediation.
The Author in Victorian Literary Culture. Dr. Andrea Selleri is completing a monograph on the history of the idea of the author between Romanticism and Formalism. The book will show that in Victorian criticism 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. But with the development of alternative aesthetic ideals over the period, especially among Aestheticist writers at war with the prevalent morality, the method came under sustained fire. This dynamic laid the groundwork for early twentieth-century Modernist poetics.
Melancholy’s Wake: Feeling and Social Life, Burton to Keats. Dr. Jonathan Williams is currently working on a book project that argues that writers in eighteenth-century Britain deployed the feeling of melancholy as a figure for and a way of coming to terms with some of the contingencies of their historical presents. In the eighteenth century, this book argues, writers incorporated, sometimes simultaneously, the language of both depressive and genial states of mind to expound a more capacious version of the feeling: the model of melancholy that this book elaborates makes possible a mode of social criticism that fuses the physical body, mental activity, social life, and the cosmos.