From Jane Austen and modernism to Irish, American and contemporary poetry
Literature research at Oxford Lifelong Learning currently focuses on:
Links to current DPhil projects will be added here soon.
Researcher
Professor Tara Stubbs
Project overview
The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion
The project examines the idea of the Irish sonnet in twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, demonstrating what has been described by critics as a ‘proliferation’ of the form in the last 70 years, and tracing this ‘proliferation’ back to the formal innovations of W. B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. Indeed, Seamus Heaney’s sonnet ‘When all the others were away at Mass’ (from Clearances) was voted Ireland’s favourite poem of the last 100 years in a recent poll. The book argues for the significance of the Irish sonnet, written by men and women alike, as a discrete entity within modern and contemporary poetry; and shows how the Irish sonnet has itself become a debating chamber for discussions concerning the relationship between Irish and British culture, poetry and gender, and revision and rebellion.
Through its understanding and exploration of the contrarieties of the sonnet form from its very beginnings, the book aims to show how the ‘modern Irish sonnet’ appears as a discrete form through its revision of, and rebellion against, the sonnet and its assumptions. The study contends, therefore, that it is the very contradictions of the sonnet form that appeal to Irish writers in the modern period, as their poetry processes the contrarieties of Irish identity.
The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (forthcoming: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Professor Stubbs has also recently published a review article of Anglo-Irish poet and sonneteer Richard Murphy’s The Kick and In Search of Poetry in Irish Studies Review.
Related publications
‘What price stone? The shaping of inheritance into form in Richard Murphy’s The Price of Stone sonnet sequence’, in Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy, ed. Ben Keatinge (Cork UP) Forthcoming.
‘W.B. Yeats and the Ghost Club’, Irish Writing London, Vol.1, ed. Tom Herron (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.21–33.
Researcher
Professor Sandie Byrne
Project overview
In Jane Austen’s Possessions and Dispossessions, Byrne argues that an understanding of the contemporary significance of material objects is vital to an understanding of Jane Austen’s fiction, and that Austen’s narratives deploy material objects in the service of characterisation as well as plot.
The first section looks at some of the material objects owned, treasured, and lost by Jane Austen and her family. Whilst not a biographical reading of the novels, the study acknowledges that dispossession is a note-worthy theme in Austen’s letters as well as her fiction.The second section examines the representation, description, ownership, gain, and loss of material objects in Austen’s novels.
Byrne is currently working on a comparison of the representation of natural and cultivated landscapes in the work of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, to be called ‘Exit pursued by Gypsies’.
Publication
Researcher
Professor Sandie Byrne
Project overview
The Lexical Fields in Fiction 1750 to 1818 project is a corpus-based research project which aims to a) establish and compare the extent and diversity of lexical fields within sets of sample literary corpora, and b) to chart the occurrence in the sample corpora of narrative fiction of lexemes from lexical fields prevalent in near-contemporary non-fiction texts. The period 1750 to 1818 has been chosen to provide a selection of texts whose publication dates fall immediately before and immediately after the life of Jane Austen (1775-1817), whose six complete mature works comprise the initial corpus.
The DPhil in Literature and Arts is a part-time, interdisciplinary research degree exploring British cultural history, c.1450–1945, in a global context.
