James Vigus

I research the literature and philosophy of the period of European Romanticism, especially the early reception of German thought in Britain, with particular focus on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry Crabb Robinson. As co-series editor of the Henry Crabb Robinson Project, I am preparing a critical edition of Robinson’s ‘Reminiscences’, held in manuscript by Dr Williams’s Library, for publication with Oxford University Press. The Project is affiliated with the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English. I have special responsibility for the topic ‘Crabb Robinson and Germany’, having published a critical edition of Robinson’s Essays on Kant, Schelling, and German Aesthetics (MHRA, 2010) and contextualised Robinson’s philosophical development in publications such as my essay collection (edited with Helmut Hühn, Jena) Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-Period Aesthetics (Legenda, 2013). My uncovering of Robinson’s erudition in the field of aesthetics sprang from comparison with the prose works of Coleridge, which I analysed in relation to ancient Greek and modern German sources in Platonic Coleridge (Legenda, 2009). I continue to publish work on Coleridge’s philosophy.

From these core interests I have branched out into publications on topics such as the impact of Coleridge’s work on subsequent literary culture (Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. with Jane Wright, Palgrave 2008); and Anglo-German interpretations and adaptations of the forms of humour in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy, ed. with Kathleen M. Wheeler and Klaus Vieweg, Legenda 2013). Other topics within the culture of the ‘long’ eighteenth century culture that I have addressed include: the rights of animals, as discussed by both George Fox (founder of Quakerism) and Thomas Taylor the Platonist; intersections between religion and philosophy in Romantic-period writing; and Lord Byron’s satire on European politics in the 1820s. I am working on a project on Hamburg as a travel destination for British writers in the wake of the French Revolution, which engages with economic, social and environmental history. I am assistant editor of the De Gruyter journal Angermion: Yearbook for Anglo-German Literary Criticism, Intellectual History and Cultural Transfers.