Professor Daniel Karlin
Winterstoke Professor of English Literature
Room: 1.11
Phone: 0117 331 8245
Fax: 0117 331 7933
Email: Daniel.Karlin@bristol.ac.uk
Contents
Education and academic career
I was born in London in 1953, and was educated at St Paul’s School and Queens' College, Cambridge (BA, 1974; PhD, 1981). I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford (1978-80) and was appointed to a lectureship at University College London in 1980. I was appointed Reader in 1993, and Professor in 1995. I left UCL in 2005 to take up a post at Boston University (University Professors Program and Department of English). In 2006 I returned to England to the University of Sheffield.
Research
My primary field of research is Victorian poetry, especially the work of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Other strong interests include nineteenth-century American literature, and the work of Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, and Bob Dylan.
My current research includes a project on the 'figure of the singer' in English poetry, and (with Samantha Matthews) an edition of Henry James's The Bostonians; I am also planning collaborative projects on musical settings of nineteenth-century poems and on the use of French words and phrases in English literature.
Publications
Books
- The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985
- (ed.) Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1987
- (ed.) Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: the Courtship Correspondence 1845-1846. A Selection, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989
- (ed.) Browning: Selected Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin Poetry Library, 1990
- (ed.) Rider Haggard, She, Oxford: World's Classics, 1991
- (ed., with J. Woolford) The Poems of Browning, vols. 1 and 2, Harlow: Longman [Annotated English Poets], 1991
- Browning's Hatreds, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993
- (with J. Woolford), Robert Browning, Harlow: Longman [Studies in 18th and 19th Century Literature], 1996
- (ed.) The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, Harmondsworth: Allen Lane / Penguin, 1997
- (ed.) Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry and Prose, Oxford University Press [Oxford Authors], 1999
- Proust’s English, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
- (ed., with J. Woolford and J. Phelan) The Poems of Browning, vol. 3, Harlow: Pearson Education [Longman Annotated English Poets], 2007
- (ed.) Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
- (ed., with J. Woolford and J. Phelan), Browning: Selected Poems, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2010
Chapters and introductory essays
- 'Plain Tales?' in P. Mallett (ed.), Kipling Considered, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 1-18
- 'Beatrice Signorini: Browning's Last Portrait', in S. Perosa (ed.), Browning e Venezia, Florence: Leo. S. Olschki, 1991, pp. 325-37
- Introduction, Robert Browning: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. A. Roberts Oxford University Press [Oxford Authors], 1996, pp. xi-xxvii (re-issued in World's Classics series, 2004)
- 'Did He Eat Ortolans? Browning, Food, and Italy', in J. Woolford (ed.), Robert Browning in Contexts, Winfield, Ks.: Wedgestone Press 1998, pp. 148-60
- 'The Figure of the Singer in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy', in P. Mallett (ed.), The Achievement of Thomas Hardy, Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000, pp. 117-36
- 'Having the Whip-hand in Middlemarch', in A. Jenkins and J. John (eds.), Rereading Victorian Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000, pp. 29-43; earlier version publ. in George Eliot Review 28 (1997) 34-47
- 'Bob Dylan's Names', in N. Corcoran (ed.), Do you Mr Jones? Bob Dylan among the Poets and Professors, London: Chatto & Windus 2002, pp. 27-49
- '“The Names”: Robert Browning's “Shaksperean Show”’, in A. Poole and G. Marshall (eds.), Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 2: Literature and Culture, London: Palgrave 2003, pp. 150-69
- 'The Case of the Capable Fingers: a Della Street Mystery', in P. Thurschwell and L. Price (eds.), Literary Secretaries and Secretarial Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate 2005, pp. 111-28
- 'Victorian Poetry of the City: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh', in V. Tinkler-Villani (ed.), Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature [DQR Studies in Literature 32] Amsterdam: Rodopi 2005, pp. 113-24
- 'From Dark Defile to Gethsemane: Rudyard Kipling's War Poetry', in T. Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century British and Irish War Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, pp. 51-72
- '“I have strange power of speech”: Narrative Compulsion after Coleridge', in J. Vigus and J. E. Wright (eds.), Coleridge's Afterlives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008, pp. 128-48
- 'Tennyson, Browning, and Virgil', in R. Douglas-Fairhurst and S. Perry (eds.), Tennyson Among the Poets, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, pp. 95-114
Articles in reference works (selection)
- Introduction, English Poetry: A Bibliography of the English Poetry Full-Text Database Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1995, pp. i-xi
- Entries on Robert Browning and individual works in M. Drabble (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edition, Oxford University Press, 1985 (incorporated in 6th ed., 2000)
- (with John Woolford and Joseph Phelan) Entry on Robert Browning in J. Shattock (ed.), The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 3rd ed., vol. 4 (1800-1900) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999
- Article on Robert Browning in D. S. Kastan (gen. ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006
Journal articles and essays (selection)
- 'Browning's Paired Poems', Essays in Criticism 31 (July 1981) 210-27
- 'The Sources of The Englishman in Italy', Browning Society Notes 14 (Winter 1984/5) 23-43
- 'Whitman: The Civil War Poems', Proceedings of the British Academy 73 (1988) 259-84 [Chatterton Lecture, 1987]
- 'Browning's Poetry of Intimacy', Essays in Criticism 39 (1989) 47-64
- 'Captains Courageous and American Empire', Kipling Journal 63 (September 1989) 11-21
- 'Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, and Mesmerism', Victorian Poetry 27 (Autumn-Winter 1989) 65-77
- 'The Discourse of Power in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Criticism', Studies in Browning and His Circle 20 (1996) 30-38, repr. in S. Donaldson (ed.), Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, New York: G.K. Hall 1999, pp. 333-41
- 'The Brownings' Marriage: Contemporary Representations', Studies in Browning and His Circle 21 (November 1997) 33-52
- 'Kipling and the Limits of Healing', Essays in Criticism 48 (October 1998) 331-56
- '“Repetition-Work and Richness”: a Feature of Kipling's Style', Kipling Journal 73: part 1 (September 1999) 54-62; part 2 (December 1999) 11-21
- 'The Figure of the Singer', Essays in Criticism 50 (April 2000) 99-124
- 'Life in the Desert: Browning, Moses, and St John', Studies in Browning and His Circle 25 (May 2003) 49-71
- 'Striking the old grey stone: the Breton context of Fifine at the Fair', Browning Society Notes 29 (January 2004) 7-20
- 'On Being Second-Rate: the Skeleton Art of Thomas Lovell Beddoes', Yearbook of English Studies 36.2 (2006) 35-50
- 'When the Blow Gets Home: Rudyard Kipling’s Songs of the Submarine’, TLS, 5 October 2007, pp. 14-15
- 'Editing the Rubáiyát: Two Case-Studies and a Prospectus', Victorian Poetry 46.1 (2008) 87-103
- 'The angry Omar: Edward FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát revised for a new readership', TLS, 9 January 2009, pp. 14-15
- 'Actions and Reactions': Kipling's Edwardian Summer', Kipling Journal 84, no. 336 (April 2010), pp. 8-22
Lectures and conferences (selection)
- The British Academy Chatterton Lecture, 1987
- Browning e Venezia, Fondazione Cini, Venice, 1989
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, 1993
- Browning Study Day, National Portrait Gallery, 1996
- Thomas Hardy Society Annual Conference, 1999
- The City in Literature, Leiden, 2000
- Thomas Hardy Society London Lecture, 2000 ['Hardy, Proust, and the Shapes of Lost Time']
- Bateson Lecture, Oxford, 2000
- Armstrong Browning Library, 50th Anniversary Conference, 2001
- Browning Society International Conference, Vallombrosa, 2005 ['Robert Browning's “A Face”’]
- Rudyard Kipling, University of Kent, 2007
- Churchill Lecture, University of Bristol, 2008 ['Writing and Rewriting the Rubáiyát']
- Omar Khayyám, Edward FitzGerald and the Rubáiyát, Trinity College, Cambridge, July 2009 ['Much Ado about Nothing in the Rubáiyát']
- Alan Marre Maccabaeans Centenary Lecture in the Humanities, May 2010 [‘Bard makes not Poem’: The Figure of the Bard in the Nineteenth Century']
- Study Day on Kipling’s Actions and Reactions, June 2009, University of Sheffield Humanities Research Institute
I have given graduate or staff seminar papers at universities in the UK and USA including Birkbeck College (University of London), Birmingham, Bristol, California Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Harvard, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield, Strathclyde, and York, and have given shorter conference papers at the British Association for American Studies, the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, the Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University, and the Institute of English Studies.
Editorial positions
- Co-editor, Browning Society Notes, 1978-1981.
- General editor for post-1750 texts, Longman Annotated Texts, 1990-2001 Editions supervised: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. M. Mason (1992); Hardy, selected poetry, ed. T. Armstrong (1993); Cowper, The Task and other poems, ed. J. Sambrook (1994); Clough, selected poems, ed. J. Phelan (1995); Blake, selected poems, ed. D. Fuller (2000); Victorian Women Poets, ed. V. Blain (2000).
- Member of editorial board of English Poetry 600-1900: A Full-Text Database, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey 1994
- Co-editor (with T. Keymer), Nineteenth Century Fiction, Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey 2000 [database]
- Consultant for Nineteenth Century Poetry and Fiction, Everyman Library CD-ROM Project, Anglia Multimedia, 2000-01.
- Member of steering committee for The Brownings' Correspondence Research Project, De Montfort University, 2007-
Teaching
I have taught at undergraduate level on subjects from almost every period of post-medieval literature, with the exception of modern critical theory. I think a year wasted in which I do not teach something I have never done (and preferably never read) before. At Bristol I will be contributing to Literature 3 and Literature 4, and teaching courses in editorial method and 'classic' American literature.
I taught on the MA Anglo-American Literary relations at UCL during the whole of its span (1983-1998), and subsequently taught on the MA Issues in Modern Culture and the College-based MA in Film. At Sheffield I contributed to the core module for the MA in Nineteenth-Century Studies and to the module Fiction and Reality. At Bristol I will be contributing to the 'pathways' in Romanticism and in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
I have supervised PhD students on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the literary marketplace of the 1830s to contemporary American apocalyptic fiction. Current projects include the use of French in eighteenth-century British fiction, Walt Whitman and early British socialism, and the relation between literary and scientific discourse in the Victorian period. I have planned and delivered subject-specific research training modules for graduate students, including one on Critical Writing.
I welcome applications in all areas covered by my research. I am more interested in evidence of intellectual curiosity and a sense of what literary scholarship involves than in the exact fit of a research proposal to my own specialism.