Isabelle Stuart

Supervisor: Professor Michael Whitworth 

Research Interests: modern and contemporary literature, digital humanities, poetry performance, lectures, modernism, literary language, poetics, metre, scansion, Victorian poetry, sound studies. 

Doctoral Research: My doctoral research examines the influence of verse recitation practice and theory on the development of modernist poetics from 1889 to 1939. While print played a crucial and well-documented role in shaping modernist poetics, poets like W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot always also intended for their poetry to be read aloud, and thought deeply about the place of orality in their poetry. My thesis recovers the rich network of poetry recitation contexts– from verse speaking teachers to societies and competitions– that thrived alongside and interacted with the beginnings of poetic modernism. It uses archival and digital methods to define the relationship between elements of these modernist poetry recitation cultures and key features of modernist poetics, such as impersonality, the politics of audience, free verse and the fascination with verse drama. My research is funded by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, an Asa Briggs Fellowship from Worcester College, and a Clarendon Scholarship. In 2023-4 I took up a Sachs Scholarship at Princeton University, and in 2023 my research was awarded the Fathman Young Scholar Award from the International T. S. Eliot Society. 

Publications: 

'"The World That Sang and Listened": Yeats and Florence Farr's 'New Art' of Verse Speaking' in The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024). 

'Reading Eliot Aloud', The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, 5:1 (2023).