Profile

My work explores the problems and posibilities posed by aesthetic experience, particularly in the context of Romantic and post-Romantic literature. My first book examined the ideological workings and implications of the Romantic concept of the imagination from Wordsworth and Coleridge through George Eliot. I am presently completing a book manuscript on something I am calling a "radical aestheticism," the term that I believe best describes the nature of a recurring event in certain of the most powerful and resonant texts of the British Romantic literary tradition. I am interested in the various forms and effects of this aesthetic radicalization in a strain of Romanticism that extends from Percy Shelley and Keats through Dickinson, Hopkins, and Dante Rossetti through Wilde.