Prof. Michael Bradshaw
I joined Edge Hill University in April 2009, having previously worked at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Bristol, the University of the West of England, Japan Women’s University, and the University of Tokyo. I hold degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol.
As Head of Department, I have overall responsibility for academic planning and development, but I also devote as much time as possible to my own teaching and research.
I am a specialist in Romanticism, especially poetry and drama of later Romantics, such as Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hood, Keats, Landon and Shelley. I have also published on ‘Romantic generations’, Romantic fragment poems, and the periodical press in the 1820s. I am currently working on the representation of disability in the Romantic era, and on the comic poetry of Thomas Hood.
Teaching and Supervision
At undergraduate level, I’ve taught most periods and genres of literature at one time or another, but have tended to concentrate on pre-1900 poetry and drama. I particularly enjoy teaching Renaissance writing, including Shakespeare studies.
Currently at Edge Hill, I contribute to the Level 5 historical literature modules ‘The Renaissance: Texts and Contexts’ (LIT 2100) and ‘Order and Chaos: Literature, 1700-1830’ (LIT 2101), as well as offering my own Level 6 option ‘The Shakespeare Problem’ (LIT 3123), which focuses on genre, reception and ideology.
I also teach a module on our interdisciplinary MA programme, ‘Cultures of Anatomy’ (HUM 4007), which combines elements of literature, cultural studies and the history of science, and studies the way modern artistic representation of the human body has been affected by scientific and medical discourse.
I would be interested to discuss research degree proposals in any aspect of Romanticism – not necessarily limited to my favourite themes and authors described above.
Research
- Romanticism, especially later Romantic poetry and drama
- Fragments in theory and practice
- The representation of the body
- Writing and laughter
- Poetic parody
- Canonicity; the work and status of ‘minor’ authors
Publications
- ‘Staging Acts of Union in George Darley’s Sylvia; or, the May Queen’, in Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830, ed. Gioia Angeletti (Parma: Monte Universitá Parma, 2010), pp. 147-70
- ‘Third-generation Romantic poets: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon’, Ch. 29 of The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 542-60
- ‘Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 21-40
- ‘Bloody John Lacy’: The London Magazine and the Doldrums of English Drama’, in The British Periodical Text, 1797-1832 ed. Simon Hull (Tirril: Humanities eBooks, 2008), pp. 122-43
- The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. with an introduction Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007)
- ‘The Jest-Book, the Body and the State’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. with an introduction Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 67-80
- ‘Hedgehog Theory: How to Read a Romantic Fragment Poem’, Literature Compass (eJournal, 2007)
- ‘Imagining Egypt: Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir’, in La Questione Romantica, 12 / 13 (2002), 49-64 [actual date of publication 2005]
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 text, ed. with an introduction Michael Bradshaw (Manchester and New York: Carcanet / Routledge, 2003)
- ‘Burying and Praising the Minor Romantic: The Case of George Darley’, Poetica, 54 (2001), 93-106 (also guest editor of this number)
- Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001)
- A New Anthology of Modern English Poetry, ed. with an introduction Michael Bradshaw, Hisaaki Yamanouchi and Hatsuko Niimi (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 2001)
- ‘Reading and Surface in Keats’s “The Eve of St Mark”’, Studies in English and American Literature (Tokyo), 35 (2000), 97-115
- ‘Beddoes and the Poetics of Fragmentation’, Agenda, 37, 2-3 (1999), 264-80
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Selected Poetry, ed. with an introduction Michael Bradshaw and Judith Higgens, (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)
- ‘Resurrecting Thomas Lovell Beddoes’, in The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, ed. Sharon Ruston (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment vol. 153) (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1999), pp. 139-57
- ‘Mary Shelley’s Last Man (The End of the World as We Know It)’, in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity – Extrapolation – Speculation, ed. Peter Stockwell and Derek Littlewood (Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature 17) (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), pp.163-76
- ‘“The Sleep of Reason”: Swamp Thing and the Intertextual Reader’, in Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, ed. Matthew J.A. Green (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2012)
- ‘Centaur Poetics: Interrupted Forms in Thomas Hood’s Lost Classic’, in Essays in Honour of Professor Hatsuko Niimi, ed. Masashi Suzuki (Tokyo: Sairyu-sha, forthcoming 2012)