Dr Deborah Lam

My current monograph project frames an approach to Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, which attends to their work in terms of excess: that is, the ways in which their art and writing go beyond formal limitations, and cross moral lines that are either self-regulated by the text or artwork, or are culturally imposed. By juxtaposing these artists and writers, this interdisciplinary study explores how the capacity of excess to articulate the limits they defy offers an insight into their resistance to formal and cultural expectations, canons of taste, and ethical norms that arbitrated the evolving artistic values in the long nineteenth century.

Building on existing research in art and poetry, my second project reconceives artistic labour in terms of effort – a slippery word that encompasses ambiguous and often-overlooked aspects of work, such as sincerity, intentionality, and what William Morris thought of as pleasurable labour. Provocative aesthetic debates in the long nineteenth century – Turner’s hazy Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites’ overwrought surfaces, their contemporaries’ artistic techniques they had scorned as sloppiness, and Ruskin’s moral outrage at Whistler’s paint flinging – all belie the way in which? value is inextricably bound up with the nature of the effort involved in artistic production. Attending to forms of effort and unfinishedness as a sign of what the artist is trying to do, the project hopes to be similarly hardworking, and will use these discussions of artistic labour to develop a theory of poetic effort.

Outside this research, I am variously interested in, and have written or presented on, eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, particularly Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Hazlitt, Hume, Kant, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley; nineteenth-century poetry and visual culture; medieval Italian literature, especially Dante; nonsense literature; and selected twentieth-century authors (namely James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, and Louis MacNeice). More broadly, I am interested in the relationship between literature and visual art; poetry and poetics, literature’s interrelations with philosophy (phenomenology, epistemology, and poststructuralism in particular); other writers of interest include Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, W. H. Auden, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney

I first read English and Related Literature at the University of York, and then for an MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, before coming to Bristol for my PhD.