Research Interests
His wider research interests are in the development of genre from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Emily Brontë. Current thematic research interests include the development of the verse novel, print and manuscript cultures since 1700, lyric studies and the musicality of verse, the role of lyric anthologies in canon creation and periodisation, the origins and legacies of ‘Romanticism’, the influence of sceptical philosophy and aesthetics on English verse, Anglo-American intersections, editing and textual criticism, and temporality in narrative verse. He has supervised dissertations on a range of topics within Romantic and Victorian literature, from Hopkins’s religious orders to the manuscripts of Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Tennyson and the Revision of Song
Among Michael’s current projects is the first book-length study of Tennyson’s manuscript revisions, and their role in the development of his style. Its chapters examine how Tennyson’s notebooks record a series of profound shifts in the style of English verse and versification, stretching from the Romantics to the end of the nineteenth century. Uncovering new manuscripts from Cambridge, Lincoln, and Harvard, the monograph traces how literary modes – from the lyric to the epic – were altered on the page, as new movements modified the conventions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Extensive archival research for this study was supported by a Rodney G. Dennis Visiting Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard, which offered the resources to consult over 70 notebooks and 300 folders of Tennyson’s drafts and correspondence. Chapters arising from this research have been published in Essays in Criticism and Literary Imagination, and the resulting articles examine Tennyson’s selection of poems for The Golden Treasury (1861), the most influential lyric anthology of the nineteenth century. By considering the anthology’s fair copy alongside a rediscovered revision copy, the articles shed new light on Tennyson’s poetic influences, and on his aesthetic control over the formation of a Victorian literary canon.
The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson, 9 volumes (Oxford University Press)
General Editor: Dr Michael Sullivan (Oxford)
Advisory General Editor: Dr Catherine Phillips (Cambridge)
The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson for Oxford University Press will be the first edition to include the full manuscript variants of Tennyson’s poetry, with the author’s spelling and the original order of publication. The advisory board comprises Professor Jane Stabler (St Andrews), Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Oxford), Professor Stephen Gill (Oxford), Professor Marion Shaw (Loughborough), Professor Daniel Karlin (Bristol), Professor Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin), Professor Peter McDonald (Oxford), and Dr Nicolas Bell (Cambridge).