John Bowen

 

John Bowen

CONTACT

INTERESTS

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature. He read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and then took an MA and PhD at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. His main research area is nineteenth-century fiction, in particular the work of Charles Dickens, but he has also written on modern poetry and fiction, as well as essays on literary theory. His Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford University Press, 2000) appeared in paperback in 2003, as did his edition of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge for Penguin. 2005 saw the publication of Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, co-edited with Professor Robert L. Patten of Rice University. He has also contributed to the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, the Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins and has written about Victorian comic and satiric writing for the forthcoming Cambridge History of English Literature. He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and has contributed to a number of television documentaries and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 4's Front Row, In Our Time, Open Book, PM, Today, Woman's Hour and, most recently, BBC1's Inside Out and the 2008 Channel 4 documentary Dickens’s Secret Lover. You can read recent TLS reviews of Jenny Hartley's Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women and Michael Slater's new Life of Dickens at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5759585.ece#and http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6874324.ece#and hear Professor Bowen on Radio 4's Today programme discussing Little Dorrit and the Madoff affair at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7785000/7785365.stm

He is currently completing a jointly-authored book with Anthea Trodd on the literary collaborations of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and on a successor to Other Dickens. Other projects include essays on Dickens for Dickens in Context (CUP) and The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists and on the Brontes for The Oxford History of the Novel in English. His undergraduate teaching includes courses on the Victorians and Romantics and special options on Dickens and (with Professor Tom Baldwin) Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Literary Theory. He contributes to the core courses of both the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and the MA in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and offers an option module, 'Strangers to Ourselves: Dickens and Collins'.

Professor Bowen has a close relationship with the University of California Dickens Project, is a member of its faculty and will be lecturing on David Copperfield at this summer's Dickens Universe. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction. He is a Fellow of the English Association and is a former President of the Dickens Society.

RESEARCH SUPERVISION

He would be pleased to receive proposals for doctoral research on most areas of nineteenth century fiction, in particular on Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, historical fiction, comic and satirical writing in all genres, and on literary theory, particularly the work of Heidegger, Derrida and Walter Benjamin. He also has twentieth-century research interests in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and John Berger and the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He has a strong group of doctoral students, working on a wide range of nineteenth-century topics. Recent and current doctoral theses that he has supervised include 'Death Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Literature'; 'Anti-Catholicism in Dickens'; 'Nation and Persona in mid-Nineteenth Century Journalism'. 'Crime and Justice in Dickens's novels', 'Narrative Strategies in Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz', 'Adoption in the Nineteenth-century Novel', 'The Epistemology of Love: Being Known in Victorian Fiction' and 'Frances Taylor and her Circle'.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

'John Dickens's birth announcements and Charles Dickens's sisters', Dickensian, 479, vol.105, 3, Winter 2009, 197-201
'Perspective: Time for Victorian Studies?', Journal of Victorian Culture 14: 2, Autumn 2009 282-93.
'Counting on: A Tale of Two Cities' in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution ed. Colin Jones, Jo McDonagh and Jon Mee (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009) 104-124.
'Uncanny gifts, strange contagion: allegory in Dickens’s The Haunted Man' in Contemporary Dickens eds. Deirdre David and Eileen Gillooly (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008) 75-92.
'Acts of Translation', Times Literary Supplement 5457, November 2, 2007, 14.
'What next in Victorian literary studies?: Historicism and hospitality', Literature Compass vol. 3, December 2007, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00471.x.
'A Garland for The Old Curiosity Shop', in Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, vol. 37, 2006, 1-16.
'Collins's shorter fiction' in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37-49.
Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies ed. with Robert L. Patten (Palgrave, 2005)
'Dickens and the Force of Writing' in Palgrave Advances: Charles Dickens Studies ed. John Bowen and Robert L. Patten ( London: Palgrave, 2005) 255-272.
Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003) 744pp + xliii
'David Copperfield's home movies' in Dickens on Screen ed. John Glavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 29-38.
'The Historical Novel' in A Companion to the Victorian Novel ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) 244-59.
Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 232pp + x.
(ed.) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, (Herts: Wordsworth Classics, 2000)
'Spirit and the Allegorical Child: Little Nell's Mortal Aesthetic' in Dickens and the Children of Empire ed. Wendy Jacobson ( London: Palgrave, 2000) 13-28.
'Dickens and the Figures of Pictures from Italy' in The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and Beyond ed. Clare Hornsby ( London: British School at Rome, 2000) 197-217.
'Bebelle and "His Boots": Dickens, Ellen Ternan and the Christmas Stories', Dickensian vol. 96, 3, 452, Winter 2000, 197-208.

Last Updated: January 18, 2010 | Web Officer: email engl8@york.ac.uk

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