Literature and Languages

Pathfoot A16a

Department of English Studies

University of Stirling

Stirling

FK9 4LA
Scotland

UK

B.A. (UCY),M.A. (Cardiff), Ph.D. (UEA)

My research interests are in nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly the work of George Eliot and feeling, the nature of artistic labour and the history of authorship. I am an honorary fellow at the Centre of Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter.

Published work on nineteenth-and-twentieth-century authorship includes the collection Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material (Palgrave, 2007), and a long special issue, published in three instalments, on the American culture-industry of image-making for the European Journal of American Culture (2005).

My publications on the nature of artistic labour entail two books, which explore female creativity in the nineteenth century. The first volume – What is a Woman to Do? A Reader in Women, Work, and Art, c. 1830-1890 (Peter Lang, 2009 forthcoming) – is an anthology of primary material on the nineteenth-century literary market-place and related art-industries. The second book, which is work in progress, is a collection of essays with the provisional title Artistry and Industry: Crafting the Woman Professional, c. 1830-1890.

I am currently working on a monograph on George Eliot, the literary market-place and sympathy. Taking Eliot’s quest for a kind of art capable of extending sympathy as a product of response to a burgeoning print and visual culture, my book explores the gap between her redefinition of female authorship and popular constructions of her authorial image. While her reviews and fiction are well-known, I examine her translations and the majority of her poetry, which show her fascination with the Romantic ideal of the solitary artist and the possibilities/problems attached to it.