Jane E Wright

My research focuses on poetry and poetics of the nineteenth century. Poets I have written about include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In recent essays I’ve been examining the poetical history of bees as figures for the poet and how she works. You can hear me talking about the literary salience of bees, alongside experts in biology and apiculture, in an episode of Radio 4’s Natural Histories programme, ‘Bee’.

Poetry's what I most often write about, but I’m also interested in the formal and stylistic features of prose and have written on prose works by authors including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde.

I have edited a volume of essays on Coleridge's Afterlives (2008) with James Vigus (QMUL), and I am currently engaged in two collaborative projects on allusion, one a volume of essays entitled Poetic Allusion in the Long Nineteenth Century, co-edited with James Williams (University of York).

Other interests include rhetoric, aesthetic philosophy (from ancient classical writers through to the nineteenth century), nineteenth-century versions of the ancient quarrel, Victorian forms of poetical faith, and, relatedly, the poetical fortunes of sincerity as a principle of success or standard of judgement.

I’m a life member of The Tennyson Society (which I love) and member of the Editorial Board. You can find out about The Tennyson Society here, and you can access a fascinating free series of ‘Global Tennyson Talks’, delivered on Zoom by leading international scholars, here.

I have supervised two prize-winning PhD students (working on Tennyson) and advised many more. I welcome research proposals on any aspect of nineteenth-century poetry, and/or on the following authors: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, C. G. Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Michael Field (aka Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper).