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Matthew Scott

photograph of Matthew Scott

Areas of interest

My research falls broadly within the field of British and American Romanticism but my teaching stretches over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The writers in whom I have an especial interest are Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Scott in Britain, and Emerson, Melville, and the James brothers in America but my approach to them has tended to be cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary with a strong focus upon the study of the history of aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy.

The kinds of concepts within the history of ideas that appeal to me relate to theories of literary influence, artistic representation, emotion and sympathy, orientalism and imperialism, and I am particularly interested in investigating the language or rhetoric that attends to these. Most especially, at present, I am concerned with ideas of wonder, novelty and the ordinary, and the importance that has been attached to these by writers who have argued for and against the ethical value of literary study.

Teaching

Within the department I convene modules in:

  • William Hazlitt and Revolutionary Romanticism
  • Lord Byron: Poetry, Life, Reputation
  • Nation and Empire (MA module)

I have also contributed to courses in:

  • Restoration to Romanticism; Romantics to Decadents; Nineteenth-century novel
  • Shakespeare; Critical Theory; Languages of Literature;
  • Revisioning Shakespeare Literature and Science (MA module)

Selected publications

Publications reflecting my interests include:

  • Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, Editor, with Joel Pace, (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005)*

Chapters and contributions to edited volumes

  • "Coleridge's Literary Lectures," in The Oxford Handbook of Coleridge Studies, ed. Frederick Burwick, Oxford University Press, 2009, forthcoming. (32pp MS).
  • "Coleridge and European Literature," in The Oxford Handbook of Coleridge Studies, ed. Frederick Burwick, Oxford University Press, 2009, forthcoming. (35pp MS).
  • "Romantic Poetry" in The Year's Work in English Studies, Oxford University Press, 86, 2006, 635-651.
  • "Romantic Poetry" in The Year's Work in English Studies, Oxford University Press, 85, 2005, 613-628.
  • "Romantic Poetry" in The Year's Work in English Studies, Oxford University Press, 84, 2004, 591-609.
  • "An Ethics of Wonder and the Cure of Poetry: Wordsworth, William James and the American Reader," in Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, 212-238.*
  • "Introduction," in Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, 1-18.*
  • Translations for The Faber Book of Opera, (Faber, 2000) of French and German entries.

Articles in refereed journals

  • "Hazlitt's Burke and the Idea of Grace," The Hazlitt Review, 1, 2008, forthcoming. (26pp MS)
  • "Edward Said's Orientalism," Essays in Criticism, LVIII.I, 2008, 64-81.*
  • "John Keats and the Aesthetics of the Topsy-Turvy," European Romantic Review, 17. 2, 2006, 245-254.
  • "Romantic Identities, or What do we really have in common?" in Romanticism on the Net, 16, 1999, (18pp. MS).
  • "The Return to Poetics,"in Romanticism on the Net, 12, 1998, (16pp. MS).
  • "The Circulation of Romantic Creativity: Coleridge, Drama and the Question of Translation," in Romanticism on the Net, 2, 1996, (19pp. MS).

Reviews

  • Reviews for a number of academic journals: The Wordsworth Circle, Review of English Studies, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, The Liberal, Romanticism on the Net.

Publications