Poetry and Poetics
Events
The work of the Poetry and Poetics cluster is supported by the Poetry and Poetics Seminar Series, inaugurated by Professor Derek Attridge in 2007.
2009 programme:
- 21 October 12-1pm, Room 409, Professor Tim Kendall (University of Exeter), on war poetry (all welcome)
- 18 November, Launch of Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry (all welcome)
About this Cluster
The Poetry and Poetics cluster encompasses both literary critical and creative writing research, and is headed up by Professor Antony Rowland. The cluster comprises eleven further members (Dr Scott Brewster, Dr Susan Oliver, Dr Susan Powell, Dr Glyn White, Dr Andrew Cooper, Dr Scott Thurston, Dr Judy Kendall, Dr Carson Bergstrom, Dr Sandro Jung, Ursula Hurley and Dr Matt Boswell) and has particular strengths in three main periods: the twentieth century, the eighteenth century and the medieval period. It also supports thematic research in innovative poetics, literary Romanticism, contemporary Irish poetry and the Holocaust.
Individual researchers are internationally recognized in their fields. Rowland has recently been described as the ‘leading expert in the Anglophone world in post-Holocaust poetry’ by Professor Robert Eaglestone of Royal Holloway College. Brewster has an international profile in Irish poetry and Irish studies and is President of the Steering Board of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) and a member of the National Council of the British Association for Irish Studies. Oliver’s recent book on Scott and Byron won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2007).
Thurston has a developing international profile in innovative poetry and has, by invitation, recorded performances of his work for the ‘Archive of the Now’ collection (Brunel University). This work on innovative poetics also extends into prose fiction in White’s MUP monograph on literary readings of the graphic surface in twentieth-century experimental narrative. Through Thurston’s research on innovation in poetry and Kendall’s work on Edward Thomas, this group also has close links with the Creative Writing research cluster.
Further specialisms include the eighteenth century and Romanticism, through the research of Bergstrom and Jung; Medieval poetry, through the research of Powell, member of the Harlaxton Symposium; and Chartist Poetry, through the work of Professor Brian Maidment. Bergstrom is also Chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
Key Publications
These include:
- Scott Brewster, Lyric (forthcoming, Routledge, 2008).
- Judy Kendall (ed.) Edward Thomas’s Poets (forthcoming, Carcanet, 2008).
- Antony Rowland, Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).
- Antony Rowland, Tony Harrison and the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001).
- Susan Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2005).
- Carson Bergstrom, The Rise of New-Science Epistemological, Linguistic and Ethical Ideals and the Lyric Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2003).
- Sandro Jung, Poetic Meaning in the Eighteenth-Century Poems of Mark Akenside and William Shenstone (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2003).
[The image on this page shows Professor Derek Attridge in discussion with Professor Antony Rowland at the inaugural 'Poetry and Poetics' seminar in 2007.]