John Butler Yeats, Pippa Passes.
Watercolour and mixed media, 1869-72 (National Gallery of Ireland).
After an academic career at the University of Bristol I am an independent scholar based in Oxford and London. These pages include a list of publications, and describe some of my current and earlier projects.
I first specialised in Victorian and Modern literature, especially the work of Robert Browning.
More widely, I have published on individual writers including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, George Seferis, Ezra Pound and Seamus Heaney.
Other main interests are Philhellenism, and the reception of classical antiquity. My most recent essay is:
“Ezra Pound’s Ragbag: The Cantos as Cento”, in Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong! ed. Manuel Baumbach (Trier, 2022), pp. 21–40.
I continue to work on Edward Lear, bringing together the written and visual records of his Greek travels to reconstruct Lear’s own projected “Topography of Greece”. Available so far are:The Cretan Journal, the Grecian travels of 1848, the journeys in Greece and Albania in 1856 and 1857 and the 1848 section of the Ionian Islands, Lear in Zakynthos, Ithaca and Cephalonia.
Edward Lear, Fruit Trees, Corfu. Watercolour
with pen and brown ink over graphite, 1863
(Yale Center for British Art).