Professor Martin Priestman

Room Number: Fi108, Digby Stuart

I sudied at the Universities of Cambridge (BA) and Sheffield (PhD), after which I taught English and Drama at Roehampton, becoming a Reader in English in 1992, and a Professor in 1999. I now divide my research and publishing activities fairly evenly between Romantic Period Literature and Crime Fiction. I teach courses in both these areas, as well as Restoration/ Eighteenth-Century and Dystopian Literature, poetic technique and the creative writing of Crime Fiction, and also have an interest in British Drama of the 1950s-70s. I have recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction and The Collected Writings of Erasmus Darwin . I am currently Co-Director of the Centre of Research in Romanticism, and in 2006-8 I set up and directed the Centre for Research in Modern Literature and Culture. I warmly welcome applications for PhDs in the fields of Crime Fiction and Romantic and eighteenth-century literature.

Indicative list of publications:

Books (reverse order)

Electronic edition of The Temple of Nature by Erasmus Darwin (Romantic Circles, 2006)

First edition of The Collected Writings of Erasmus Darwin , facsimile, 9 vols, 3,764 pp. (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum Press, 2004), selected and introduced: Introduction, vol.1, pp. v-xxvii.

Edited and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 308 pp.; Introduction, pp. 1-6, ‘Post-war British crime fiction’, pp. 173-190.

Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 307 pp.

Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present (London: Northcote House and The British Council, 1998), 80pp.

Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (London: Macmillan, 1990), 217pp.

Cowper's 'Task': Structure and Influence (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 217pp.

Chapters and Articles

‘A Place to Stand: Questions of Address in Shelley’s Political Prose’, in The Unfamilar Shelley , ed. Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg, forthcoming Ashgate Press, 2008-9.

‘Visions of Matter: Lucretius and the Masons in the Romantic Late Enlightenment.’ in Pan Tra i Filosofi eds. G. Carabelli and P. Zanardi (Padua: Poligrafo, 2008).

'Lucretius in Romantic and Victorian Britain', in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, eds. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

'The Progress of Society? Darwin's Early Drafts for The Temple of Nature ', in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin , ed. C. U. M. Smith and Robert Arnott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 307-319.

'Temples and Mysteries in Romantic Infidel Writing', in M. Eberle-Sinatra, ed., Romanticism on the Net (February 2002).

'P. D. James and the Distinguished Thing', in Z. Leader, ed., On Modern British Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 234-57.

'Sherlock's Children: The Birth of the Serial', in W. Chernaik, M. Swales and R. Vilain, eds., The Art of Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 50-59.

'Up Against the Wall: Drama in the 1970s', in B. Moore-Gilbert, ed., The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure' (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 281-299.

'A Critical Stage: Drama in the 1960s', in B. Moore-Gilbert and J. Seed, eds., Cultural Revolution': The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 118?138.

Forthcoming:

Article on eighteenth-century didactic poetry for The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, eds. D. Hopkins and C. Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, date to be confirmed).

Monograph on Erasmus Darwin and the Late Enlightenment.