Professor Matthew Bevis

Prof Matthew Bevis
Professor of English Literature; Tutorial Fellow, Keble College
matthew.bevis@ell.ox.ac.uk

College webpage

My first book, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce, looked at relations between political oratory and literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. Comedy: A Very Short Introduction explored comedy as a literary genre and as a range of non-literary impulses and events (pantomime, circus, stand-up acts, caricatures, and other funny business). Wordsworth's Fun was published by the University of Chicago Press last year. 

Much of my current work focuses on poetry: essays include 'Poetry by Numbers', 'Unknowing Lyric', 'In Search of Distraction', and 'Some Birds'. Some of this material is preparatory thinking for a book I'm writing for Harvard University Press, entitled How I Wonder. I'm also working on Knowing Edward Lear for Oxford University Press, which builds on the British Academy Chatterton Lecture I gave in 2012 and a volume I co-edited with James Williams, Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry. The research has involved collaborations with the BBC, Harvard University, the Natural History Museum, the Ashmolean, the Institute of Art and Ideas, and the IKON Gallery. Full information — along with podcasts, online exhibitions, talks, and other materials — can be found here. 

I convene the Poets at Keble series, a seminar on The Poet's Essay with Adam Phillips, and The Salutation and Cat Reading Group. I have also written for The London Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Raritan, Poetry, and other papers and journals. My essays for the LRB are available here; podcasts/interviews based on my work for Poetry are available here and here.

 

I teach subjects and authors from the eighteenth century to the present.

Undergraduate: Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language and Literature); Nineteenth-Century Literature (1830-1910); Paper 5 (1760-1830), along with various special topics ('The Character of Comedy' and 'The Literary Essay') and dissertation supervision.

Graduate: MSt in English, 1700-1830, MSt in English, 1830-1914, MSt in English, 1900-Present

In the last 10 years or so, I have supervised / co-supervised / examined PhD dissertations on a range of subjects, including:

  • Poetic Address in C. H. Sisson, W. S. Graham and Geoffrey Hill
  • Byron and Epistolary Poetics
  • Joyce and Nonsense
  • Thom Gunn and The Occasions of Poetry
  • Victorian War Poetry
  • The Metrical Fingerprint in Twentieth-Century Poetry
  • John Clare and the Poetics of Health
  • Kipling and Yeats – A Comparative Biography
  • Milton After Eliot (Lowell, Empson, and Hill)
  • Forms of Textual Excess in Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey
  • The Tiny, The Miniature, and The Small in Modern American Poetry (Dickinson, Bishop, Moore, Niedecker, and Kay Ryan)
  • Resistances to Knowing in Victorian Poetry

 

Books / Edited Collections / Editions

Wordsworth's Fun (Chicago University Press, 2019), pp. 303

Crotchet Castle [for The Cambridge Edition of Thomas Love Peacock], co-ed. with Freya Johnston (Cambridge UP, 2016), pp. 328 + cxxi

Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry, co-ed. with James Williams (Oxford UP, 2016), pp. 381

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. (OUP, 2013; pbk 2016), pp. 912

Lessons In Byron (Pan Macmillan, 2013), pp. 120

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), pp. 150

The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford UP, 2007; paperback 2010), pp. 302

Some Versions of Empson, ed. (Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 376

Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson, ed. (Pickering & Chatto, 2003), pp. 504

 

Articles in Books

'Laughable Poetry', in Affect and Literature, ed. Alex Houen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 222-48.

'Charles Lamb . . . Seriously', in Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Hurley and Marcus Waithe (Oxford UP, 2018), 35-54

‘Introduction’ [co-written with James Williams], and ‘Falling for Edward Lear’, in Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry, co-ed. with James Williams (Oxford UP, 2016), 1-15 & 134-61

‘At Work With Victorian Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford UP, 2013), 1-16

‘Dickens by the Clock’, in Dickens’s Style, ed. Daniel Tyler (Cambridge UP, 2013; paperback 2015), 46-72

‘Byron’s Feet’, in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of The Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Ohio UP, 2011), 78-104

‘Tennyson’s Humour’, in Tennyson Among the Poets: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford UP, 2009), 231-58

‘Empson in the Round’, in Some Versions of Empson (Oxford UP, 2007), 1-20

‘Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry’, in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (Oxford UP, 2007), 7-33

 

Articles in Journals, Essays, Reviews, etc.

'Some Birds', Poetry (March 2020), 597-610

'Poetry by Numbers', Raritan, 37.2 (Fall 2017), 37-64

'In Search of Distraction', Poetry (November 2017), 171-94

'Unknowing Lyric', Poetry (March 2017), 575-89

‘The Funny Thing About Trees’, Raritan (Winter 2014), 86-116

‘Eliot Among the Comedians’, Literary Imagination, 16.2 (July 2014), 135-56

‘Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight’ [2012 British Academy Chatterton Lecture on poetry], Journal of The British Academy, 1 (2013), 31-69

‘Wordsworth’s Folly’, The Wordsworth Circle, 43.3 (Summer 2012), 146-51

‘Wordsworth at Play’, Essays in Criticism, 61.1 (January 2011), 54-78

‘Warring Claims: Victorian Poetry and Conflict’, Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 66 (October 2007), 415-49

‘Joyce’s Love Letters’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 44.2 (2007), 354-57

‘William Empson’, 4000-word entry in The Literary Encyclopedia (2004)

‘Tennyson’s “Roses on the Terrace”: A New Manuscript’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 8.2 (2003), 118-20

‘Volumes of Noise’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.2 (Autumn 2003), 577-91

‘Tennyson, Ireland, and “The Powers of Speech”’, Victorian Poetry, 39 (Fall 2001), 345-64

‘Dickens in Public’, Essays in Criticism, 51 (July 2001), 330-52

‘Temporizing Dickens’, Review of English Studies, 52 (May 2001), 171-91

‘Ruskin, Bright, and the Politics of Eloquence’, Nineteenth-Century Prose, 27.2 (Fall 2000), 177-90

‘Lecturing Ruskin’, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 3 (2000), 122-36

‘Tennyson’s Civil Tongue’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, 7.3 (November 1999), 113-25

+ book reviews and review-essays in a range of magazines and journals, including The London Review of Books, Harper’s, Modernism/Modernity, The Byron Journal, Review of English Studies, Modern Language Review, Essays in Criticism, Cambridge Quarterly, Tennyson Research Bulletin, and British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Literary Review.

Review-articles / essays for The London Review of Books, Harper's, and other magazines include:

'Giddy with Thinking' [on Kay Ryan], New York Review of Books (Sept 2020)

'Faintly Risible, Obscurely Resonant' [on Wordsworth], Harper's (July 2020)

'On Rachael Allen', LRB (5 March 2020)

'On Douglas Crase', LRB (25 November 2019)

'Gravity's Smoothest Dream' [on A. R. Ammons], LRB (7 March 2019), 31-33

'Foiled by Pleasure' [on Elizabeth Barrett Browning], LRB (30 August 2018), 32-34

'Are you a tome?' [on Edward Lear], LRB (14 December 2017), 27-30

'It Wants to Go to Bed with Us' [on John Ashbery], Harper's (June 2017), 78-84

'Supping on Horrors' [on Thomas De Quincey], Harper's (October 2016), 85-93

‘What most I love I bite’ [on Stevie Smith] LRB (28 July 2016), 19-21

‘The lighthouse stares back’ [on Elizabeth Bishop] LRB (7 January 2016), 9-10

‘I can bite anything I want’ [on Lewis Carroll] LRB (16 July 2015), 17-20

'Damn the Respectable' [on Edward Thomas] Literary Review (May 2015)

‘It is still mañana’, [on Robert Frost] LRB (19 February 2015), 21-24

‘Metropolitan Miscreants’ [on nineteenth-century London] LRB 4 July 2013), 32-33

‘Kids Gone Rotten’ [on Treasure Island] LRB (25 October 2012), 26-28

‘Deleecious’ [on William Hazlitt] LRB (6 November 2008), 26-28

 

Philip Leverhulme Prize (2007); Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2013); AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2016).

 

Publications

  • Wordsworth's Fun

    2019
    |
    Book
    Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.
    History

  • Poetry by Numbers

    2018
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Raritan: a quarterly review

  • 'It wants to go to bed with us' [on John Ashbery's well spent youth]

    2017
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Harper's

  • Unknowing Lyric

    2017
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Poetry

  • Crotchet Castle

    2016
    |
    Book
    • More