My research focuses on British Romantic literature and on twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone writing. I have published on writers such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yiyun Li. Topics and themes on which I have written include poetics and literary theory; literary ignorance; literature and suicide; literary posterity; letters and epistolary poetics. 

My currrent research includes essays on loss in Romantic literature and on authorship theory; a monograph on Elizabeth Bowen’s short fiction (with Nicholas Royle); and a new project on the limits of literature.

My most recently published books are Reading Keats’s Letters: An Epistolary Poetics (Cambridge University Press, June 2026); with Nicholas Royle, the 6^th edition of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Routledge, 2023) and the second edition of This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (Routledge, 2024); and as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (Cambridge UP, 2023). 

Other Books

Suicide Century: Literature and Suicide from James Joyce to David Foster Wallace (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology (Manchester University Press, 2009)

Wordsworth Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Author (Routledge, 2005)

Katherine Mansfield (Northcote House, 2004)

Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives, with Nicholas Royle (Macmillan, 1995)

Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

As editor:   

William Wordsworth in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Readers and Reading (Longman, 1995)

Reading Reading: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Reading (Tampere English Studies, 1993)

Research Supervision

I am currently supervising or have previously supervised research students on a range of topics, including Wordsworth and education; Wordsworth’s spousal verse; Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book; Wordsworth the future; purity and intoxication in Keats; Keats and Benjamin Robert Haydon; Keats and the Pre-Raphaelites; Romantic ‘last man’ literature; Bristol and the new Lyrical Ballads; De Quincey and reception; regional writing and nineteenth-century nation building; Jean Rhys and exile; Elizabeth Bowen and trauma; Bowen and the non-human; Yeats and ageing; modernist writers and boredom; science and technology in modernism; Wallace Stevens and literary theory; Don DeLillo and communication; Pat Barker and trauma; twentieth-century autobiographical writing; David Foster Wallace and embodiment; philosophical scepticism in David Foster Wallace; Samuel Beckett and transgression; haunted memories in Kazuo Ishiguro; queer grief in SE Asian diasporic writing.

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I am happy to consider supervising prospective research students interested in working on a range of Romantic, and twentieth-century and contemporary writers and topics: please get in touch if you would like to discuss your research plans.