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Professor Tim Fulford

Job: Professor of English

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Research group(s): Centre for Textual Studies

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

T: +44 (0)116 250 6239

E: tfulford@dmu.ac.uk

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

 

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Personal profile

Professor Fulford’s research lies in the area of literature in the Romantic era, in the contexts of colonialism, exploration, science, landscape, the picturesque, religion.  He has published many articles and books on these topics, featuring such writers as William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Robert Bloomfield, Mary Robinson, William Cowper, Jane Austen and John Clare. Professor Fulford is currently preparing scholarly editions of the letters of Robert Southey and of Humphry Davy.   His next monograph will be a study of the Late Poetry of the Lake Poets.

Research group affiliations

Centre for Textual Studies

Publications and outputs

  • Farmers' Boys and Doomed Youths: Producing the Poet in the Print Culture of the Romantic Era.
    dc.title: Farmers' Boys and Doomed Youths: Producing the Poet in the Print Culture of the Romantic Era. dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description.abstract: Two of the ten bestselling poets of the nineteenth century were almost completely excluded from the twentieth-century canon. Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) and Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) were huge successes in the expanding print culture of the Romantic era. Their publications were influential on many of the poets who were admitted to the canon. Nevertheless, they have become so obscure that their influence—powerful on Clare, Keats, and Shelley for example— has been almost entirely forgotten. So has their role in shaping the cultural figure of the Romantic poet and their impact upon the publishing of poetry in a period when bookselling was transforming into a sales-driven mass market. Both were from the laboring class; each was publicized commercially because it was, supposedly, amazing that they had become poets at all, considering their social origins. They happened to be excellent poets but, in an early manifestation of PR, they were as much branded as phenomena as they were advertised for excellence. In this article I shall explore how this packaging worked and what it shows about the selling of books, the construction of a cultural image of the poet, and the influence of their poetry on aspiring poets. dc.description: open access article
  • Robert Southey Lives of Labouring-Class Poets
    dc.title: Robert Southey Lives of Labouring-Class Poets dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description.abstract: The Lives of Uneducated Poets, written by Robert Southey and published in 1831, unites several poets under the ‘uneducated’ banner, being the first to identify them as a group and claiming their their writing was worth consideration as that of a class. The book's foundational role contributes to the current interest in labouring-class/self-educated poetry and nineteenth-century history and culture. Accompanied by a new introduction written by Southey scholar Tim Fulford, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of Literary History.
  • Robert Southey Essays Moral and Political 1832
    dc.title: Robert Southey Essays Moral and Political 1832 dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description.abstract: Robert Southey's Essays Moral and Political, originally published in 1832, brings together many of Southey’s most influential journal pieces, providing important evidence for students of the political and literary culture of the Romantic period. Edited by Tim Fulford, this volume features a full introduction and detailed editorial notes setting the Essays in their contexts. The volume sets the Essays in the context of the political and social issues and controversies on which they comment, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Literary and Political History. dc.description: SCHOLARLY EDITION
  • Collected Poems of Henry Kirke White
    dc.title: Collected Poems of Henry Kirke White dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description.abstract: This book is the first-ever scholarly edition of one of the bestselling and most revered poets in the nineteenth century—a poet excluded from the canon by twentieth-century critics. A poor youth who died early from tuberculosis, Kirke White shaped the popular image of the Romantic artist as a young rebel against convention who is too sensitive to survive in the harsh commercial world. As a prodigy who made his incipient death the subject of his tragic poetry, he was influential on both sides of the Atlantic—on Keats, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Emerson and Bryant. The edition restores his powerful, macabre and prophetic verse to attention, and also demonstrates his variety and range. It includes a comprehensive introduction discussing the creation of his public image, the marketing of his poetry, and the impacts he made on nineteenth-century poetry, on labouring-class writing and on publishing history. dc.description: Scholarly edition
  • Experimentalism in Wordsworth's later Poetry: Dialogues with the Dead
    dc.title: Experimentalism in Wordsworth's later Poetry: Dialogues with the Dead dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim
  • Robert Southey, Lives of Labouring-class Poets, ed. Tim Fulford (London and New York: Routledge, 2023)
    dc.title: Robert Southey, Lives of Labouring-class Poets, ed. Tim Fulford (London and New York: Routledge, 2023) dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim
  • Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and Rise and Progress of Methodism
    dc.title: Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and Rise and Progress of Methodism dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim
  • Patronage, Philosophy, and Publicity: Thomas Wedgwood, Thomas Beddoes, and the Pneumatic Institution
    dc.title: Patronage, Philosophy, and Publicity: Thomas Wedgwood, Thomas Beddoes, and the Pneumatic Institution dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim
  • Mont Blanc Imagined: Poetry, Science and the Prospect-View in Davy and Coleridge
    dc.title: Mont Blanc Imagined: Poetry, Science and the Prospect-View in Davy and Coleridge dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.
  • Humphry Davy, Jane Marcet and the Cultures of Romantic-Era Science
    dc.title: Humphry Davy, Jane Marcet and the Cultures of Romantic-Era Science dc.contributor.author: Fulford, Tim dc.description.abstract: Using the career of Humphry Davy, the era’s most famous natural philosopher, I examine the Romantic construction of the scientific genius and explore, beyond it, several of the cultures in which enquiry into nature was practised in the period. I argue that Jane Marcet introduced Davy to a more gender-balanced, continental scientific circle and that her work Conversations on Chemistry (1805) effected a feminization and democratization of the “man of science,” helping to inaugurate a new era in which mass print encouraged both women and men from socially-excluded groups to access scientific knowledge and practice. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.

View a full listing of Tim Fulford's publications and outputs.

Key research outputs

Robert Bloomfield, The Banks of Wye: A Critical Edition. Online edition of Bloomfield’s sketchbook, tour journal and Georgic poem. http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/wye/

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1811-38, 4 vols, gen. ed. with Lynda Pratt (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) 

Romantic Indians: Native Americans and Transatlantic Literary Culture 1755-1830 (Oxford: O.U.P. 2006)

Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. Co-written monograph with Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: C.U.P. 2004)

Romanticism and Masculinity (Basingstoke: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999).

Research interests/expertise

Romanticism, colonialism, exploration, science, landscape, the picturesque, religion. William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Robert Bloomfield, Mary Robinson, William Cowper, Jane Austen, John Clare, Robert Southey, Humphry Davy.

Areas of teaching

Romanticism, Gothic.

Qualifications

MA, PhD

Professional esteem indicators

Professor Fulford is on the Editorial Boards of the journals Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Wordsworth Circle, Romanticism and Victorianism Online, Essays in Romanticism and of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.  He is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and of the AHRC Peer Review Panel.

 

Tim Fulford
Romanticism and Masculinity

Romantic Indians

Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era