Humanities Faculty

Kevin M. Gilmartin

Professor of English

Research interests

Romantic literature; relationship between political journalism and Romantic poetry.

Research Statement

My current research, like my first two books, challenges canonical perceptions of the politics of British romantic literature and culture with work that is more securely grounded in a range of periodical, pamphlet and other printed sources, more alert to the range and complexity of political developments, and more productively engaged with the current work of historians.

Having just completed a book on writing against revolution, I am preparing some related articles on conservative culture--on Christian evangelical pastoral, on Wordsworth's Excursion, and on the Lake school and "the sinking down of Jacobinism" in the early nineteenth century.

I have started a book on William Hazlitt, the leading literary journalist of the period, which aims to counter available models of the literary imagination in an age of revolution by exploring Hazlitt's development as a deliberately post-revolutionary intellectual, soberly disenchanted yet sustaining prosaic forms of radical expectation. Drafted portions cover the legacy of rational dissent and the emergence of urban democratic spaces (the latter is forthcoming as an article). The book will also explore Hazlitt's relation to the popular radical press, his conception of history, his contribution to debates over population and political economy, and his distinctive development of the aesthetic response (to theater, painting, poetry, and fiction) as an occasion for political criticism.

I am also in the very early stages of a study of emerging literary representations of urban and rural poverty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. So far, literary scholarship has addressed this inadequately, primarily through the poetry of Wordsworth. My aim is to set out instead from the transformative impact of Malthus, and to understand literary developments within the broader framework of political economy and controversies over the poor laws in the decades leading up to major poor law reform in the 1830s.

Publications

Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Popular Radicalism and the Public Sphere. Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 549--557.

Radical Print Culture in Periodical Form. In Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, pages 39--63. Edited by T. Rajan and J. M. Wright. Cambridge University Press, 1998.