Professor Fergus McGhee

Fergus McGhee
Associate Professor of English Literature; Tutorial Fellow, Corpus Christi College
fergus.mcghee@ccc.ox.ac.uk

I work on nineteenth-century poetry and non-fiction prose, especially in relation to visual art, moral philosophy, and intellectual history. Rather than advancing from any pre-ordained theory or context, however, I believe the best criticism always begins from the text's own expressive and inventive qualities. I therefore have a particular commitment to close reading and its creative possibilities.

My first book project, The Estranging Sea: Knowing Oneself and Others in Victorian Poetry, traces the passionate, compromised quests to know people—oneself, one another, and God—in a wide range of Victorian poetry. From Robert Browning to Alice Meynell, poets across the period show how the failure to know people as surely, or as intimately, as we desire may produce a host of unsuspected possibilities and pleasures. Such writing asks how knowing others relates to knowing oneself, and to being known in turn—concerns which have typically been regarded as the preserve of the novel. Bringing close readings of poetry into conversation with contemporary essayists and philosophers (Emerson, Ruskin, Pater, Newman, McTaggart), this study builds on Stanley Cavell's work on language and scepticism to reveal a new dimension of Victorian moral psychology and literary creativity. I also show how poetic form offers distinctive resources to ethical reflection, expanding accounts of literature's ethical value beyond familiar claims bound up with narrative as well as more recent appeals to otherness. An article I have already published in this vein, ‘Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness’, was awarded the Review of English Studies Essay Prize in 2020.

My second book, The Art of Indistinctness, traces the broad cultural debate, stretching across the nineteenth century, about the uses of indistinctness in art. Forging new connections between aesthetics, psychology, visual culture, and literary form in the period, this study examines the various kinds of value (including moral value) placed upon indistinctness as a tool of artistic expression. Beginning with John Ruskin's spirited defence of Turner’s painting, I show how Victorian criticism thinks carefully about the conceptual and expressive potential of indistinctness, and how this discussion incubated and responded to formal innovation across the arts. I then relate these developments to nineteenth-century psychological inquiry into perception and states of reverie and daydream. My article ‘Rossetti’s Giorgione and the Victorian “Cult of Vagueness”’ trials some of these questions in relation to a single sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and was awarded the Richard D. Gooder Prize for the best scholarly essay on the relations between literature and the arts in 2021. My article in Victorian Studies (‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Déjà Vu’) demonstrates how one might integrate close attention to literary form with the history of psychology, a key method for this project.

Further research interests include the history of criticism and the Victorian reception of the Renaissance, reflected in my recent work on Walter Pater (‘Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader’) and J. A. M. Whistler ('Whistler and the "Poetry" of Pictures').

I have also edited a special issue of the journal Victorian Poetry which explores the theme of 're-encounter' from a wide range of interdisciplinary angles.

 

Recent Conference Papers

‘Body, Soul, Speech: Wittgenstein and Rossetti’, British Association for Victorian Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, University of Oxford (July 2025)

‘“Fused and Blent”: Body and Soul in D. G. Rossetti’, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, USA (March 2025)

‘Whistler and the Idea of Poetry’, Whistlerism: International Conference, University of Rouen Normandie / University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France (June 2024)

‘Pater the Inventor’, Walter Pater, ‘The Renaissance’, and Legacies of Aestheticism, Trinity College, Oxford (June 2023)

‘Criticism and Invention’, The Functions of Criticism, University of Cambridge (May 2023)

‘“All this hath been before”: Tennyson and Déjà Vu’, Victorian Resurrections, University of Vienna, Austria (September 2022)

‘Hardy, McTaggart, and the Romance of Knowing’, British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham (September 2022)

‘Pater’s Outlines: At the Edges of Thought and Feeling’, Sensations and Ideas, International Walter Pater Society Conference, Iuav University of Venice, Italy (July 2022)

‘Alice Meynell: Secrecy and the Sacred’, Truth, Mystery & Investigation, Midwest Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, Loyola University, Chicago, USA (May 2021)

At Corpus, I teach three period papers – Prelims Paper 3 (1830–1910), Prelims Paper 4 (1910–present), and FHS Paper 5 (1760–1830) – as well as the theory and practice of criticism (Prelims Paper 1).

For the Faculty, I convene the third-year paper ‘Seeing Things: Poetry and the Visual Arts’ with Prof Matthew Bevis. Previously, I convened a course on life-writing with Prof Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. I give lectures on poetry, the philosophy of literature, and nineteenth-century writing about art.

At graduate level, I teach a course on ‘Modern Lyric’ which explores the rich field of English lyric poetry from the Romantic period to the present day. This course asks how thinking about ‘lyric’ as a distinctive genre or mode can illuminate vital aspects of how poems work and the difference they make in the world.

I have supervised undergraduate and Master's dissertations on a wide range of nineteenth-century authors including Coleridge, the Brownings, the Spasmodic poets, Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Swinburne, and Michael Field.

I welcome inquiries about doctoral projects in any of my areas of interest. Please note that this does not include novels.

After a first degree in Theology (at Cambridge), I was lucky to win a scholarship to pursue a second undergraduate degree in English at Oxford. I subsequently returned to Cambridge for the MPhil and completed my DPhil at Oxford in 2021, supported by a joint award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and All Souls College. From 2020-23 I was Haworth-Campbell Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where – together with a colleague in Classics – I founded the Cambridge Lyric Network, a cross-disciplinary forum for research on lyric poetry. I currently sit on the Executive Committee of the International Walter Pater Society.

Beyond my academic research I have written widely about literature and ideas for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Art Newspaper.

Books

  • The Estranging Sea: Knowing Oneself and Others in Victorian Poetry (monograph in preparation).
  • The Art of Indistinctness (monograph in preparation).

Special Issues

  • Victorian Re-Encounters, special issue of Victorian Poetry, vol. 61, no. 2 (2023), eds. Dominique Gracia and Fergus McGhee.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

  • ‘Whistler and the “Poetry” of Pictures’, Essays in Criticism (forthcoming 2026).
  • ‘Pater’s Montaigne and the Selfish Reader’, in Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies, eds. Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 73-87.
  • ‘Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-Encounter’, introduction to Victorian Re-Encounters, special issue of Victorian Poetry, vol. 61, no. 2 (2023), pp. 133-42.
  • ‘Rossetti’s Giorgione and the Victorian “Cult of Vagueness”’, Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3 (2021), pp. 279-95.
  • ‘Clough, Emerson, and Knowingness’, Review of English Studies, vol. 71, no. 300 (2020), pp. 413-32.

  • ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Déjà Vu’, Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 1 (2019), pp. 61-84.

Essays and Reviews

  • Review of Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation by Giuseppe Pezzini, The Pelican Record (2026).
  • ‘All the Assujettissement: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt’, review of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Gregory Tate, London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 22 (18 Nov. 2021), pp. 39-41.
  • 'Poem of the Week: “Conversations” by Muriel Spark’, Times Literary Supplement online (4 Feb. 2020).
  • 'Poem of the Week: “Si Dieu n’existait pas” by John Burnside’, Times Literary Supplement online (6 Aug. 2019).
  • ‘Poem of the Week: “The Exulting” by Theodore Roethke’, Times Literary Supplement online (8 Jan. 2019).
  • ‘Poem of the Week: “Over Sir John’s Hill” by Dylan Thomas’, Times Literary Supplement online (12 Jun. 2018).
  • ‘Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow’, The Art Newspaper, no. 299 (Mar. 2018), p. 30.
  • ‘Poem of the Week: “Hunting Season Opens on Wild Boar in Chianti” by Robert Penn Warren’, Times Literary Supplement online (17 Apr. 2018).
  • ‘Collegiate Verse’, review of Trinity Poets: An Anthology of Poems by Members of Trinity College, Cambridge, ed. Adrian Poole and Angela Leighton (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5980 (11 Nov. 2017), p. 28.
  • ‘Poem of the Week: “Kranich and Bach (brand name of a piano no longer made)” by John Hollander’, Times Literary Supplement online (24 Oct. 2017).
  • ‘Poem of the Week: “One Grey Greek Stone” by Lawrence Durrell’, Times Literary Supplement online (18 Jul. 2017).
  • ‘Fairy Tales’, review of The Golden Key: A Victorian Fairy Tale by George Macdonald, illus. Ruth Sanderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5961 (30 Jun. 2017), p. 31.
  • ‘In Brief’, review of Cecil Dreeme: A Novel by Theodore Winthrop, ed. Christopher Looby (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), Times Literary Supplement, no. 5949 (7 Apr. 2017), p. 31.
  • ‘A Venice Collection’, The Book Collector 65.3 (Autumn 2016), pp. 457-64.
  • ‘Look Again’, review of Drawing in Venice: Titian to Canaletto at the Ashmolean Museum, The Oxonian Review 29.2 (26 Oct. 2015).
  • ‘Cold Pastoral?’, review of Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea by David Konstan, The Oxonian Review 27.6 (31 Mar. 2015).
  • ‘Metaphors Behaving Badly’, review of Metaphor by Denis Donoghue, The Oxonian Review 27.1, (19 Jan. 2015).
  • ‘His Itchy Intelligence’, review of Rembrandt: The Late Works at the National Gallery, The Oxonian Review 26.3 (10 Nov. 2014).
  • ‘Minority Culture’, review of 'The Death of the Serious Novel', the Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture, by Will Self, ORbits (1 Jul. 2014).
  • ‘Veronese at the National Gallery’, review of Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice at the National Gallery, ORbits (6 May 2014).
  • ‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me’, review of Culture and the Death of God by Terry Eagleton, The Oxonian Review 25.1 (5 May 2014).
  • ‘Sex and the City of God’, review of 'Rethinking the History of Sexuality in the West', the Oxford University LGBT Lecture, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, ORbits (25 Feb. 2014).
  • ‘An Interview with Diarmaid MacCulloch’, The Oxonian Review 24.2 (17 Feb. 2014).
  • ‘On the Open Sea’, review of Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher, The Oxonian Review 23.7 (20 Jan. 2014).

Publications