Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies

John Barrell (Cantab.), PhD (Essex), FBA

Office: KG/74
Tel: internal 4981, external 01904 434981
Email: engl18@york.ac.uk
Department: English and Related Literature

INTERESTS

John Barrell has published widely on the literature, history and art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain , focusing on language, landscape, law, empire, theories of society and progress, and the theory of painting. He is beginning to research a book on painters and politics in the 1790s, and with Tim Whelan of Georgia Southern University he is co-editing an edition of the political pamphlets of William Fox.

RESEARCH SUPERVISION

Professor Barrell has supervised doctoral dissertations on the following subjects: The Idea of Solitude in English Pastoral; Eighteenth-Century Didactic Poetry; Wordsworth and the Sense of Place; Romantic Irony; The Whig Idea of Landscape; The Rhetoric of Political Economy; George Crabbe; Wordsworth and the Discourse of the Sublime; the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson; The Criticism and Politics of Coleridge; Political Economy and the Novel; The Supernatural, 1770-1800; The Technology of English Watercolour Painting; Law and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Scotland; Prostitution and the Eighteenth-Century Novel; Literary History and the Nation, 1790-1830; Representations of Slavery in the Romantic Period; the idea of 'Literature' in the 1790s; Picturesque Tours of Scotland; Perambulations of Eighteenth-Century London; Romantic Ideas of Genius; the politics of Coleridge's Poetry; George IV: a Caricature Biography; Plebeian Prospects, 1750-1830; the rhetoric of Political Pamphlets 1790-99; Rossetti and Ekphrasis; Idleness and Aesthetic Education 1770-1830; Representations of the Crowd 1770-1849.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Professor Barrell is Fellow of the British Academy and of the English Association, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters of the University of Chicago . He is an advisory editor of Rural History, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Literature in History, Textual Practice, Visual Culture in Britain , and Trent Editions.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books by John Barrell include:

  • The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972);
  • editor, S.T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each (London: Everyman University Library, 1972);
  • co-editor, with John Bull, The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse (London: Allen Lane, 1974);
  • The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);
  • English Literature in History 1730-1780: An Equal, Wide Survey , in the series English Literature in History, general editor Raymond Williams (London: Hutchinson, and New York: St Martin's, 1983);
  • The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: 'The Body of the Public' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986);
  • Poetry, Language and Politics , (Manchester: Manchester University Press, and New York: St Martin's, 1988);
  • The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981);
  • The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, and Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992);
  • editor, Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
  • Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 ( Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2000);
  • editor, Exhibition Extraordinary!! Radical Broadsides of the Mid 1790s ( Nottingham : Trent Editions, 2001).
  • The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s ( Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press, 2006);
  • co-editor, with Tim Whelan, The Political Pamphlets of William Fox ( Nottingham : Trent Editions, 2009).

 

 

 

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John Barrell