DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
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Dr Jane Wright
Lecturer
Room: 2.15
Phone: 0117 928 9196
Fax: 0117 331 7933
Email: jane.wright@bristol.ac.uk
Research interests
My research interests span the nineteenth century but focus on Victorian literature, and especially poetry. I am currently writing a book about the literary fortunes of the concept of sincerity in Victorian poetry, poetics, and criticism. Authors of particular interest include Tennyson, Browning, Clough, Arnold, and Hopkins. I have co-edited (with James Vigus, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena) a collection of essays on the literary afterlives of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and I am also working on an edited selection of previously unpublished letters of the Tennyson family. Wider interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature include the politics and representation of gender and sexuality, and relationships between literature and visual culture.
I would welcome applications for postgraduate work on most areas of nineteenth-century literature, but particularly on any of the above-named authors and topics.
Edited collection
- Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. James Vigus and Jane Wright (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). Contributors: John Beer, Frederick Burwick, Paul Hamilton, Anthony Harding, Douglas Hedley, Daniel Karlin, Seamus Perry, Lynda Pratt, Stephen Prickett, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, James Vigus, Laura Dassow Walls, Ross Wilson, Jane Wright.
Book chapters / parts of books
- 'Matthew Arnold' in The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2012)
- 'Sincerity's Repetition', in Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity, ed. Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010)
- (with James Vigus) 'Preface' to Coleridge's Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008)
- ‘The Sin in Sincerity: ethics, aesthetics, and a critical tradition from Coleridge to Wilde’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008)
Articles
- 'An Unnoticed Allusion to Henry V in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, in ANQ (Routledge, forthcoming 2012)
- 'Appreciating Memorialization: In Memoriam, A.H.H', in The Tennyson Research Bulletin, 9:1 (November 2007), 77-95
- ‘A Reflection on Fiction and Art in “The Lady of Shalott”’, in Victorian Poetry, 40:2 (Summer 2003), 287-290
- ‘Tennyson’s The Princess’, in The Explicator, 60:2 (Winter 2002), 67-68
Dictionary / encyclopedia entries
- Sixteen entries (new or heavily revised) in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edn, ed. Dinah Birch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009), on: Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, 'The House of Life', Idylls of the King, May Kendall, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Amy Levy, W. J. Linton, George Meredith, Emily Pfeiffer, Elizabeth Siddal, Arthur Symons, Alfred Tennyson, John Todhunter, and Jane ('Speranza') Wilde
- Entries on William Johnson Fox, Arthur Henry Hallam, John Todhunter, and Charles Henry Waterhouse in Thoemmes Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers (May 2002). Todhunter entry reprinted in Thoemmes Dictionary of Irish Philosophers (2004)
- Biographical entry (2000 words) on Arthur Hugh Clough (2002) for the Literary Encyclopedia.
Articles currently with readers include
- Hopkins's Dividing Errors'
Selected research papers
- 'Browning and the Absent Background', invited paper delivered at the Victorian Research Seminar, School of English, University of Leeds (25 March 2010)
- 'Tennyson's Promise', delivered at 'The Young Tennyson: International Bi-Centenary Conference', University of Lincoln (19 July 2009)
- 'Hopkins’s Dividing Errors', invited paper delivered at 'The Finest Verbalism of Victorian Poetry', one-day workshop, School of English and Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of Sheffield (10 March 2007)
- 'Stuck in Carlyle'’s throat: sincerity and an uncomfortable need for repetition', delivered at 'Acts of Sincerity: Authenticity and Identity in the Romantic Era', Symposium hosted by the University of the West of England in association with the Centre for Romantic Studies, University of Bristol (15 July 2005)
- '"This vice I cannot have escaped…": Hopkins’s sincerity', Research Forum, Clare College, Cambridge (16 February 2005)
- Opening paper delivered at 'Victorian Visions' one-day conference, Clare College, Cambridge (1 October 2004)
- Introductory paper on Coleridge's Victorian Afterlives, delivered at 'Coleridge's Afterlives' conference (co-organised with James Vigus), Clare College, Cambridge (30 July 2004)
- 'Clough’s early poetry and Oxford diaries', Victorian Research Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge (1 October 2002)
Other activities
- Since 2002 I have been a member of the Editorial Board of The Tennyson Research Bulletin and from 2004 to 2010 was the Bulletin's Reviews Editor (see the Tennyson Society Website for further details). In 2005 I gave the invited Address at the Tennyson Memorial Service, Somersby, Lincolnshire (7 August)
- Academic reader and adviser: Manuscripts and proposals read for Blackwell Publishing and Palgrave Macmillan
Teaching
I am currently teaching:
- Approaches to Poetry (level 1; lectures and tutorials)
- Victorian Poetry: Belief, Doubt, and Dissent (level 2; seminars)
- Literature 4 (1830-1945) (level 3; lectures and tutorials)
- Aesthetic Possibilities (level 3 / MA; seminars)
- Romanticism (MA Pathway)
I also do some teaching for the following units/programmes:
- George Eliot (level 2; seminars)
- Contemporary Literature (level 1; lectures)
- Literature 3 (1700-1830) (level 3; lectures)
- iBAMH (intercalated degree in Medical Humanities)
- ELCE (English Literature and Community Engagement)
Topics of undergraduate dissertations that I have supervised include: 'Gerard Manley Hopkins: prayer and praise'; 'Tennyson's literary landscapes'; '"I'm an artist, sir, | And woman": reading Aurora Leigh'; and 'Angela Carter: Imagining Popular Culture'. I have supervised MA dissertations on topics including 'Unmarried Women and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Women's Fiction', 'The Charming Egotist in the works of Jane Austen and George Eliot', and 'Ernest Hemingway and Gender'.
I am currently supervising a PhD dissertation on 'Tennyson and Goethe's Faust'.