Undergraduate Teaching
Prelims Paper 1b at Jesus College; Prelims Papers 3 and 4, and FHS 5 at other colleges.
Research Interests
My research explores conceptions of the value of art and literature in Victorian literature.
Does art make us “better” in some way – morally, spiritually, and/or therapeutically? My monograph Desperate Remedies and Vital Lies: Art, Literature, and Self-Conscious Escapism, 1840-1910, which has been submitted to OUP at the invitation of the OEM Committee, answers these questions through study of a crisis in mid-to-late Victorian and Edwardian accounts of aesthetic education. After shaken faith in orthodox religious accounts of the meaningfulness of earthly suffering, the arts promised to take over the work of spiritual instruction and emotional consolation traditionally performed by the Christian pastoral tradition of “the cure of souls.” Many were far from convinced by this prospect, however. Writers of the period had to grapple with an intensely polarised cultural terrain, in which art was either idealised as a substitute religion or cynically reduced to the status of a diverting illusion, which prevents us from perishing of ugly existential truths. Seeming to accept the reductively escapist conception of art while all the time ironizing it, John Ruskin (1819-1900), George Eliot (1819-1880), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) developed self-conscious escapisms, which acknowledge the very truths they supposedly seek to elude. Much as in a dream one can feel in two places at once, aesthetic experience, they suggest, allows us to both think and not think about life’s problems simultaneously. Making their readers sceptical of both illusion-puncturing and escapist disavowal as, purportedly, the only games in town, these post-Romantic ironists constructed credible apologia for art’s worth, neither naïve nor defeatist.
Demonstrating how they rework themes from ancient philosophy, Christian scripture, Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, Keats, Kierkegaard, and Ibsen – as well as the physiological aesthetics, sexual psychology, and classical scholarship of their day – the monograph demonstrates the unlikely power of their ironic accounts of aesthetic education as a “vital lie,” or life-giving illusion. It is an exploration that uncovers how their writings offer us a clear-sighted view of the value of art and literature, suggesting how both culture and criticism might help us reconcile ourselves to the demands of conscience and the what’s-really-there of reality, even while fantasizing about throwing off the yoke.
Publications
- “‘Certain Cathartic, Aristotelian Qualities’ in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy,” Modern Philology (forthcoming February 2025).
- “The Abyss Behind the Mask: Ekphrastic Disembodiment and the “Bronzino” of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902),” The Henry James Review 45, no. 2 (Spring 2024), 135-149.
- “Holy and Profane Love in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr Fortune Fictions,” The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 18, no. 1 (2018), 30–44.
This article won the Mary Jacobs Prize for 2017.
Links
Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:
- Classics and English
- English Language and Literature
- English and Modern Languages
- History and English
See also Faculty of English website and Harry’s personal profile.