Professor Michael Bradshaw

Teaching & Research

At undergraduate level, Michael has taught most periods and genres of literature at one time or another, but has tended to concentrate on pre-1900 poetry and drama. He particularly enjoys teaching Renaissance writing, including Shakespeare studies. At his previous institutions he also designed and taught the specialist MA modules ‘Cultures of Anatomy’ and ‘Revenge in Theory and Practice’.

At Worcester Michael will contribute to the teaching of early modern and Romantic literature, and intends to introduce Critical Disability Studies to the theory curriculum. He is currently writing a new module on Romantic writing for Level 5 of the BA English Literature course, which will hopefully run from 2018-19.

The Institute has a growing community of research students, studying for MRes and PhD degrees. Michael would be interested to discuss research degree proposals on any aspect of Romantic literature and culture.

Research interests

• Romanticism, especially late Romantic poetry and drama: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hood, Keats, Landon, Landor, Milman, and the Shelleys
• The representation of the body in literature, criticism, and theory
• Fragments in theory and practice
• Canonicity; the work and status of ‘minor’ authors
• Critical Disability Studies
• Literature and laughter

Professional Bodies

Higher Education Academy

British Association for Romantic Studies

North American Association for the Study of Romanticism

Publications

Books and editions

Disabling Romanticism: Body, Mind, and Text, ed. by Michael Bradshaw (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); includes Introduction, pp. 1-28

The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. by Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 text, ed. by Michael Bradshaw (Manchester and New York: Carcanet / Routledge, 2003)

Resurrection Songs: The Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001)

A New Anthology of Modern English Poetry, ed. by Michael Bradshaw, Hisaaki Yamanouchi and Hatsuko Niimi (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 2001)

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Selected Poetry, ed. Michael Bradshaw and Judith Higgens, (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999)

Journal articles and book chapters

‘Alexander’s Expedition: Textual Form in Thomas Beddoes’s Revolutionary Journey, forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism (2018)

‘Romantic Generations’, in The Oxford Handbook to British Romanticism, ed. by David A. Duff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming 2018)

McInnes, Andrew, Michael Bradshaw, and Steve Van-Hagen, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Romanticism on Edge’, forthcoming in Romanticism (2018)

‘The Jew on Stage and on the Page: Intertextual Exotic’, in Staging the Other in Nineteenth-century British Drama, ed. by Tiziana Morosetti (Berlin, Oxford, and New York: Peter Lang, 2015), pp. 41-60

‘The Miniature Sublime: Later Fortunes of the Cockney Aesthetic’, in Romantic Adaptations: Essays in Mediation and Remediation, ed. by Cian Duffy, Caroline Ruddell, and Peter Howell (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 73-86

‘“The Sleep of Reason”: Swamp Thing and the Intertextual Reader’, in Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition,ed. by Matthew J.A. Green (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 121-39

‘Thomas Hood and the Art of the Leg-Pull: Laughter, Pain, Disability’, La Questione Romantica – Nuova Serie, 3, 1: Body / Anatomy issue, ed. Tiziana Morosetti and Norbert Lennartz (2011) [actual date of publication 2013], 117-29

‘Centaur Poetics: Interrupted Forms in Thomas Hood’s Lost Classic’, in A Firm Perswasion: Essays in British Romanticism, ed. by Hatsuko Niimi and Masashi Suzuki (Tokyo: Sairyusha 2012), pp. 213-36

‘Staging Acts of Union in George Darley’s Sylvia; or, the May Queen’, in Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain, 1760-1830, ed. by Gioia Angeletti (Parma: Monte Universitá Parma, 2010), pp. 147-70

‘Third-generation Romantic poets: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon’, Ch. 29 of The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 542-60

‘Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. by Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 21-40

‘Bloody John Lacy’: The London Magazine and the Doldrums of English Drama’, in The British Periodical Text, 1797-1832 ed. by Simon Hull (Tirril: Humanities eBooks, 2008), pp. 122-43

‘The Jest-Book, the Body and the State’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. by Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 67-80

‘Hedgehog Theory: How to Read a Romantic Fragment Poem’, Literature Compass, 5, 1 (2008), 73-89

‘Imagining Egypt: Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir’, in La Questione Romantica, 12 / 13 (2002), 49-64 [actual date of publication 2005]

‘Burying and Praising the Minor Romantic: The Case of George Darley’, Poetica, 54 (2001), 93-106 (also guest editor of this number)

‘Reading and Surface in Keats’s “The Eve of St Mark”’, Studies in English and American Literature (Tokyo), 35 (2000), 97-115

‘Beddoes and the Poetics of Fragmentation’, Agenda, 37, 2-3 (1999), 264-80

‘Resurrecting Thomas Lovell Beddoes’, in The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism, ed. by Sharon Ruston (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment vol. 153) (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 1999), pp. 139-57

‘Mary Shelley’s Last Man (The End of the World as We Know It)’, in Impossibility Fiction: Alternativity – Extrapolation – Speculation, ed. by Peter Stockwell and Derek Littlewood (Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature 17) (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996), pp.163-76

‘Landor, Walter Savage, Imaginary Conversations’, in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee and Diane Long Hoeveler, 3 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 772-76

‘Elizabethan Style in Drama’, in The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature, ed. by Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee and Diane Long Hoeveler, 3 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 415-21

External Responsibilities

Reader / referee for:

• Ashgate Publishing
• Concentric: Literary & Cultural Studies
• European Romantic Review
• Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Layman Poupard Publishing
• Literature Compass
• Liverpool University Press
• Nineteenth-century Contexts

External Examiner / assessor for:

• Coventry University (2017-18)
• University of Gloucestershire (2015)
• University of Huddersfield (2007-12; 2016)
• University of Wales, Trinity St David (2013)