Dr Steve De Hailes

Steve has published on liminality and the otherworld in medieval and early modern literatures, fairy and supernatural encounters, romance convention, and representations of landscape. He works primarily with Middle English and Modern English literatures from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.

Steve's current research focuses on mountains in the medieval imagination. He has a forthcoming article in New Medieval Literatures on mountains in the Alliterative Morte Arthure (c.1400) and he is working on a monograph that examines mountains in premodern English literatures within the context of broader European ideas and traditions concerning highland landscapes. Steve's research seeks to identify the layers of meaning that can be attributed to mountain landscapes by medieval commentators. He is interested in exploring the intersections between literal and metaphorical interpretations of mountains; the inherent complexity of mountain landscapes as spaces associated with (to give a few examples) defence, danger, outlawry, monstrocity, trade, agriculture, worship, and pilgrimage; and the relationship between lived experience and inherited knowledge of mountainous terrain.

Steve has also worked extensively on the otherworldly conventions of romance, particularly in the context of fairy encounters and their relationship to liminal landscapes. A key focus of this research has been to demonstrate just how pervasive the recurring themes and motifs of fairy encounters are, and to demonstrate their widespread use and appeal, not just in works of romance, but in other contemporary modes and genres as well. To this end, Steve has publsihed work on the presence of fairy convention in the Middle English dream vision Pearl and in Ben Jonson's city comedy The Alchemist. In 2020, Steve successfully defended his PhD on 'The Use and Development of the Faerie Sign in Romance from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period', supervised by Dr Cathy Hume and Dr Laurence Publicover.