Dr Steve Van-Hagen
Programme Leader for BA English Literature
Academic Interests
- Eighteenth-Century literature
- Labouring-class poetry (especially Stephen Duck and James Woodhouse)
- Chuck Palahniuk
- American nature writing (especially H D Thoreau and Edward Abbey)
Publications
Research and Publications
My doctorate was awarded by the University of Kent for a thesis on the Poetry of Physical Labour 1730-1800, a study of the work of poets including Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Robert Tatersal, Mary Leapor, Susanna Blamire, Anne Wilson, Robert Bloomfield, Richard Jago, James Bisset, Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse. My edition of selections from Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus was published in 2005 (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press) and I have recently completed a book entitled The Poetry of Mary Leapor for the Focus On series published by Greenwich Exchange Press. I have published a number of articles in journals and magazines on topics including Stephen Duck, Woodhouse, and eighteenth-century washing-day poems. I have also authored more than thirty encyclopedia entries, including some twenty contributions to The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com, ed. Robert Clark). I have published articles in the poetry press on a range of topics related to eighteenth-century and modernist American poetry, and my own poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and anthologies. I am a member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and have given papers at three of the last five BSECS conferences.
I am currently writing an article for The Literature Compass on the life, career and reception of James Woodhouse, as well as writing The Student Guide to Jonathan Swift for Greenwich Exchange. I am also researching a critical biography of Woodhouse. My other interests include literary representations of obsessive-compulsive disorders (and particularly in the work of the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk), and the life and career of the American eco-anarchist Edward Abbey.