Visual and Material Culture

Our Research

In our research we explore the rich relationships that literature has to nineteenth-century visual and material culture, in poetry, fiction, photography, painting, and ephemera.

Current Topics 

The team is working on a number of projects including:

The influence and reception of John Milton across the Romantic and Victorian periods in both literature and visual culture, including the work of Mary Shelley, John Martin, Herman Melville, J. M. W. Turner, A.C. Swinburne, Ford Maddox Brown, and Thomas Hardy.

Nineteenth-century printed ephemera in Britain and America (especially greetings cards or exchange cards), with an emphasis on materiality, affect, and the cultural significance of graphic/textual ephemeral objects.

The representation of early photography and film in British and American literature 1850-1915, focusing particularly on depictions of poverty in the work of Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.

William Blake as visual artist, including his place within art history and his reception and influence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Image: Art by William Blake, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons