Graduate Student, School Of English Literature Language and Linguistics
Thesis Title: '"Poetry, Facts and Calculating Processes": The Political Economy of Shelley's Prose'.
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Dr. Michael Rossington
Dr. Ella Dzelzainis |
About
I am currently writing an AHRC-funded PhD on the prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. This ranges from his earliest essay, 'The Necessity of Atheism' (1811), to his final major prose work, 'A Defence of Poetry' (1821). I am particularly interested in highlighting how Shelley's work engages with eighteenth and early nineteenth-century political economy, and how his fascination with economic affairs shapes, as well as is influenced by, his distinctive definition of Poetry. My research focuses also upon questioning the hostility of Romanticism towards the mathematical and demographic methods of political economy itself. This involves drawing attention to the innovative, and even imaginative methodologies of figures like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. I argue that Shelley not only admired financial conventions such as a self-interested free market, international trade and a restored gold standard, but also identified their visionary potential. In contrast to his reputation as a idealistic, or even escapist poet, my thesis presents Shelley as an economic theorist in his own right.
My broader research interests include Romanticism and genre, utilitarian ethics and economics, the relationship between imagination and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, radical agrarianism, and the Reform Movement of the 1810s. I am particularly interested in the way in which economic discourse in this period can be viewed as a literary, as well as social or political form. Other figures relating to my research include Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Spence, Leigh Hunt, William Cobbett, and James Mill.
I recently reviewed a biographical work on Shelley for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (March 2010), and currently co-organise sessions for the North East Postgraduate Research Group for the Long Nineteenth Century:
http://www.northeast19thcentury.org/
Memberships:
The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association
British Association for Romantic Studies
The North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies
North East Postgraduate Research Group for the Long Nineteenth Century.
My academic blog:
http://leannestokoe.blogspot.co.uk/
