Professor Joseph Phelan

Job: Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: +44 (0)116 207 8265

E: JPhelan@dmu.ac.uk

W: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/soh

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Personal profile

Professor Phelan graduated from King's College Cambridge, and obtained his MA and PhD at King's College London. He has held posts at a number of UK universities, including a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church Oxford.

His research focuses on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century. He is co-editor (with Professors John Woolford and Daniel Karlin) of the Longman Annotated English Poets series The Poems of Robert Browning, volume 4 of which appeared in 2012. He is also the editor of the Journal of Browning Studies (formerly Browning Society Notes), an annual journal devoted to the lives and work of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Other publications include The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005), which was named as an ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ by Choice magazine, and Clough: Selected Poems (Longman, 1995). Dr Phelan is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

Professor Phelan would be interested in supervising postgraduate work on most aspects of nineteenth-century poetry, and on Anglo-French and Anglo-Italian literary and cultural relations during the period.

Publications and outputs

The Jewish ‘Monopoly’ of the Slave Trade in the Early Middle Ages: The Origins of an Enduring Historical Motif
dc.title: The Jewish ‘Monopoly’ of the Slave Trade in the Early Middle Ages: The Origins of an Enduring Historical Motif dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: This article examines the evidence to support the claim that the assertion that Jews played a leading role in the slave trade in the period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire originated with the work of a number of late nineteenth-century historians, particularly Heinrich Graetz and Wilhelm Roscher. The author finds prior examples of this historical motif in the work of several earlier historians, and traces its origins back to the Henry Hart Milman's History of the Jews published in 1829. His article demonstrates that Milman's work was widely known and used throughout the nineteenth century, and examines the reasons behind the emphasis in his work on the mutual antagonism between Christians and Jews. The article then goes on to examine the adoption of this motif by late nineteenth-century Jewish writers, including the historian and folklorist Joseph Jacobs, and its appearance in standard reference works like The Jewish Encyclopaedia. It concludes with some reflections on the reasons for this surprising development, as well as some suggestions about the reasons for the renewed interest in this topic among historians in recent years. dc.description: open access article
“Quickening Life:” Motherhood and the Unborn Child in Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book
dc.title: “Quickening Life:” Motherhood and the Unborn Child in Aurora Leigh and The Ring and the Book dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: Both Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69) have at their centers women who become mothers as the result of acts of sexual violence, but who are nevertheless moved to feats of self-sacrifice and even heroism in defense of what the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, calls the “unborn child.” This article examines the representation of attitudes towards the “unborn child” in these poems in the context of changing legal, medical, and social attitudes to abortion and infanticide in the mid-nineteenth century, and argues that their emphasis on the importance of motherhood and what Pompilia in The Ring and the Book refers to as the child’s “right of life” should not, as the dominant critical tradition suggests, be read as an endorsement of patriarchal ideology but as the product of an essentialist view of gender identity that represents gestation and motherhood as radical challenges to the prevailing social order rather than acts of acquiescence in it. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
"‘One of the Roughs’: Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, and Bleak House"
dc.title: "‘One of the Roughs’: Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’, and Bleak House" dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: The article examines a hitherto unrecognised verbal resemblance between a crucial section of Whitman's 'Song of Myself' and Dickens's Bleak House, and suggests that Whitman's declaration of poetic independence in the poem might have been influenced by a probably unconscious reminiscence of Dickens's work. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.
The Poems of Robert Browning, Volume 6
dc.title: The Poems of Robert Browning, Volume 6 dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P.; Woolford, John; Karlin, Daniel dc.description.abstract: An edition of Robert Browning's epic poem The Ring and the Book, first published in 1868-9. Volume 5 consists of Books 1-6 of the poem, and Volume 6 consists of Books 7-12.
The Poems of Robert Browning, Vol. 5
dc.title: The Poems of Robert Browning, Vol. 5 dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P.; Woolford, John; Karlin, Daniel dc.description.abstract: An edition of Robert Browning's epic poem The Ring and the Book, first published in 1868-9. Vol. 5 consists of Books 1-6 of the poem, and Volume 6 consists of Books 7-12.
The French Ideal: Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan
dc.title: The French Ideal: Matthew Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: This article examines the significant but often conflicted roles that two prominent French intellectuals, Renan and Sainte-Beuve, played in Arnold’s construction of France as a counterpart to the narrowness and Philistinism of English cultural and intellectual life. Sainte-Beuve epitomised, for Arnold, the value of persuasion in critical writing, the power to “charm and disarm” opponents into submission almost in spite of themselves. Renan, on the other hand, represented the advanced critical spirit which enabled France to face the challenges of the future with a clarity and candour lacking in England. Together, these two critics provided Arnold with what he calls, in his studies of the Bible, the “method” and the “secret” needed to carry out his “true life’s work: the attenuation of the ‘Hebraic’ element in English cultural and political life, and in the Protestant Christianity that underpinned it.” This determination was founded, in part, on the ideas of racial difference that Arnold had inherited from his father, and to which Renan had given “the imprimatur or modern scholarship and criticism”.
A Source for Robert Browning's A Likeness
dc.title: A Source for Robert Browning's A Likeness dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: This article suggests that an incident recalled in a recently published letter of Robert Browning's to his friend Lady William Russell might be a source for his poem 'A Likeness', first published in Dramatis Personae (1864). The letter concerns a portrait of Lady William by Browning's friend Seymour Kirkup. The letter also links the poem to the late 1850s, and so helps to clarify the order in which the poems in Dramatis Personae were written. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.
Review of Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (eds.) Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019
dc.title: Review of Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (eds.) Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019 dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: A review of an edited collection of essays on the subject of rhythm in poetry.
“Bloomluxuriance:” Compound Words in the Poetry of the 1830s and 1840s
dc.title: “Bloomluxuriance:” Compound Words in the Poetry of the 1830s and 1840s dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: This article examines the use of compound words in the poetry of the 1830s and 40s in the light of contemporary theories about the origins and development of the English language. Focusing especially on the changes made by Tennyson to 'Oenone', it argues that compound words formed an integral part of a self-consciously radical and experimental poetics which was subsequently repudiated by the poets themselves in the pursuit of orthodoxy and respectability. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.
“How came they here?” Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” Slavery, and Proto-Zionism
dc.title: “How came they here?” Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” Slavery, and Proto-Zionism dc.contributor.author: Phelan, J. P. dc.description.abstract: This article places Longfellow’s much-anthologised elegy in context, highlighting its engagement with contemporary debates about slavery, racial difference, and the restoration of the Jews to their ancestral homeland. The poem’s complex textual history, reconstructed here for the first time, helps to explain its profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the vanished Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island; their cemetery is both a monument to the shameful history of ‘Christian hate’ which drove them from Europe, and an emblem of the eventual fate of a people obsessed with the impossible dream of reviving the past and entangled in the ongoing horrors of slavery. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

Click here for a full listing of Joseph Phelan‘s publications and outputs.

Research interests/expertise

Nineteenth-century literature, especially the poetry of Robert Browning and Arthur Hugh Clough; poetic form; Anglo-Italian and Anglo-French literary and cultural relations.

Areas of teaching

Victorian Literature, Romantic Literature, Poetry, Colonial and Postcolonial Writing

Qualifications

MA (Cantab.), MA (London), PhD (London)

Courses taught

ENGL 1010 Poetry and Society, ENGL 2021 Romantic and Victorian Literature

Honours and awards

Outstanding Academic Title 2006 for The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet: awarded by Choice Magazine (the journal of the American Libraries Association)

Membership of external committees

I am a member of the committee of the Browning Society.

Membership of professional associations and societies

Member, AHRC Peer Review College (Jan. 2010 – Jan. 2013).

Conference attendance

Nov. 2012 ‘Browning and His Contemporaries’: invited plenary lecture for conference to commemorate two-hundredth anniversary of Browning’s birth to be held at Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Texas (Nov 1-3).

Sept. 2012 ‘”Sonnets from the Italian”: Felicia Hemans and the English Sonnet’: invited talk for the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne, Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

Sept 2011: ‘Arthur Hugh Clough and the Roman Republic of 1849’: invited talk for the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne, Bagni di Lucca, Italy (9 Sept).

July 2010 Poetic Apostasy: Southey’s A Vision of Judgment and Vincenzo Monti’s In Morte di Ugo Bass-Ville’, Robert Southey, Nottingham/Loughborough Universities.

June 2010 ‘Composition, Intention and Revision: The Choice of Copy-Text in the Longman Poems of Robert Browning. Works in Progress, DMU.

July 2008 ‘“The old couplet of the Skalds”: Alliteration in Longfellow’s Evangeline’, Metre Matters, Exeter University (Invited).

April 2008 ‘The DMU Survey of Undergraduate Attitudes to Postgraduate Study’, The Future of the M.A., English Subject Centre Conference held at DMU.

Feb. 2008 ‘“Here lies Browning”: Fragments and Fugitive Pieces in Volume 3 of the Longman Poems of Browning, Leicester University Victorian Studies Seminar series (Invited).

Other forms of public presentation

March 2012: ‘“Memorabilia”: Robert Browning and Literary Celebrity’: invited lecture for the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society (5 March).

May 2008 ‘Volume 3 of the Longman Poems of Browning’, Eton College (Invited; annual lecture to the Browning Society).

May 2008: Participation in public ceremony to unveil a plaque to the Brownings in Bagni di Lucca, Italy: paper presented (in Italian): ‘“Il santuario nella foresta”: Bagni di Lucca e “By the Fire-Side”’.

Feb 2010: ‘Clough and the Brownings’: paper given at a symposium to commemorate the unveiling of a blue plaque to Arthur Hugh Clough at Dr Williams’s Library, London.

Consultancy work

I have been consulted by external organisations (Disney Book Corporation, the BBC) about matters relating to the Brownings, and have advised individuals and commercial organisations (such as auction houses) on the authenticity of specific items of memorabilia.

Current research students

Gemma Palmer (1st supervisor)
Maija Kuharenoka (1st supervisor)
Susan Ibrahim (1st supervisor)
Lyndsey Worthington (2nd supervisor)

Externally funded research grants information

Co-Investigator, The Brownings’ Correspondence 1854-56. AHRC Research Grant (£520000). Start date: September 2006. End date: August 2009. With Professor Peter Shillingsburg, Scott Lewis, and Wedgestone Press.

Internally funded research project information

June 2008: RITF £1000 to visit Morgan Library, New York in June 2008 in connection with preparation of Longman Browning: Selected Poems (publ. Feb. 2010).

January—June 2010: Faculty research leave to complete monograph, The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for publication 2011).

Professional esteem indicators

Editor, Journal of Browning Studies (formerly Browning Society Notes): from 2007.

Other Reviewing Activities:

Valentine Cunningham, Victorian Poetry Now, TLS,
Marianne Van Remoortel, Lives of the Sonnet, TLS, 16 Dec. 2011
Julia Straub, A Victorian Muse, Victorian Studies 54.1 (Fall 2011)
Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral, TLS, 17 Dec. 2010
Sandra Donaldson et al., The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, TLS, 14 July 2010
Robert Waldron, The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 9 April 2010
Bruce Wathen, Sir Francis Drake: The Construction of a Hero, TLS, July 2009
Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies, TLS, May 2009
Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, TLS, 14 Jan 2009
Peter Swaab ed., Sara Coleridge, Collected Poems, TLS, 18 April 2008
Linda Kelly, Ireland’s Minstrel, TLS, 18 January 2008
Simon Dentith, Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Literature and History, 17:1 (2008), 94-5

Case studies

I have been invited to speak at public events on Clough and Browning associated with the unveiling of public memorials to the poets in London and Italy, and participated in a public commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy in Bagni di Lucca in September 2011.