About

My major research interests are currently on literature and popular visual culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to publishing a series of articles on caricature, politics and literature in the Romantic period, other new projects include an edited book of essays on the Gordon riots (for Cambridge University Press), a Romantic Circles Praxis volume on Romanticism and forgery, and a study of Milton's allegory of 'Satan, Sin and Death.' I am also working on a scholarly online edition of the Victorian radical William James Linton's illuminated poem Bob Thin; or the Poorhouse Fugitive . My previous interests have included literary forgery, working-class writing, Chartism, and popular women's texts of the postwar period. I am currently co-Director of the Centre for Research in Romanticism at Roehampton which in 2009 hosted the biennial conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies, 'Romantic Circulations'. I am a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS), the series editor of 'Radical Recovery' for Trent Editions, and an adviser for the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (NCSE).

I welcome applications for research supervision in any of the specialist areas mentioned below.

My books are:
Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation 1776-1832 (Palgrave, 2006);

The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People 1790-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2004);

The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-Century Ideas of History and Fiction (London: Associated University Press, 1986);

Faking It: Art and the Politics of Forgery (Brighton: Harvester, 1987);

Working-class Fiction: From Chartism to ‘Trainspotting’ (Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council; Writers and Their Work, 1997)

with Deborah Philips Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (London: Cassell, 1998).

I have co-edited with Zachary Leader Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832: An Anthology (London: Routledge, 1998), to which I contributed the chapter on ‘Radical Journalism’.

I have also edited 3 volumes of Chartist fiction for Ashgate: The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction (1995), Chartist Fiction: Thomas Doubleday, ‘The Political Pilgrim's Progress’; Thomas Martin Wheeler, 'Sunshine and Shadow’ (1999), and Chartist Fiction. Volume 2. Ernest Jones, ‘Woman's Wrongs’ (2001).

With John Halliwell I edited a special issue of the online journal Romanticism on the Net on the topic of 'Romantic Spectacle' (May, 2007).

Recent and forthcoming publications include:

1. 'Shelley's Mask of Anarchy and the visual iconography of female distress' in Nigel Leask and Philip Connell, eds. Romanticism and Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009);
2. 'The Spectropolitics of Romantic Infidelism: Paine, Cruikshank, and The Age of Reason', Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 54 (May 2009);
3. 'The transformation of caricature: a reading of Gillray's The Liberty of the Subject', Eighteenth-Century Studies 43. 2 (2010); ' "The dark sketches of a revolution:" Gillray, The Anti-Jacobin Review, and the aesthetics of conspiracy', European Romantic Review (forthcoming 2011).