Research and Teaching Interests
I work in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performativity and performance. My books Creating States (1994) and The Romantic Performative (2000) approach literary texts from the viewpoint of verbal performativity, speech acts, and philosophies of language. In recent years, I have been studying the influence of improvisational poetry across Europe during the Romantic period. My book Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 uncovers the popularity of on-stage poetic improvisers during this period and shows how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, gender, and national identity. My current SSHRCC-funded project, “Speculation, Improvisation, Mediality: The Late-Romantic Information Age,” concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s and investigates the era's preoccupation with personal identity, celebrity, anonymity, and pseudonymity. In the course of this research I am working with literary magazines, innovative forms of theatre, and popular fiction, especially the work of the Scottish writer John Galt. Other areas covered in my research and teaching are English and German Romantic poetry (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Hemans, Landon, Hölderlin) and fiction (Scott, Godwin, Kleist, Staël). Past and present professional roles include: Founding Member and Executive Committee member of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR); Founding Director of Western University's graduate program in Comparative Literature (MA and PhD) and the University of Zurich's PhD program in English and American Literary Studies; Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association; member of the Executive Council of the International Comparative Literature Association; Trustee of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. My research has been supported by SSHRCC, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), and the Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin; I am a past holder of the Distinguished University Professorship (Western) and the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature, and a member of the Academia Europaea.
Current Projects
"Speculation, Improvisation, Mediality: The Late-Romantic Information Age." The aim of this project is to achieve a better understanding of the literary-cultural field of the 1820s and 1830s, an era traditionally neglected by British and European literary history. Recent work in book, theatre, and media history reveals that print and performance genres proliferated during these decades, driven by technological advances, post-Napoleonic prosperity, and the demands of urban middle-class audiences. My project applies these findings to literary interpretation by analysing the reflection on media that takes place within literary texts and theatrical performances and examining how new forms of expression develop according to improvisational and speculative processes. The terms “improvisation” and “speculation” rise to prominence during this decade in frames of reference ranging from the aesthetic to the economic; both terms suggest hasty, risky action that responds to contingencies, adopts hypothetical premises, and constructs its own (pseudo-)reality. Literature thematizes these conditions, often relating improvisational action and speculative behaviour more specifically to the construction of the self. Literary magazines, popular fiction, and on-stage performances undertake various improvisational and speculative experiments with media: they combine textual and theatrical experience; they engage readers and spectators in interactive dialogue; they violate boundaries among fiction, performance, and real life. Seen in this way, the 1820s and 1830s are an “age of information” as well as a self-reflective “age-in-formation” – a surprisingly modern period when social relations and individual subjectivity were experienced as speculative and improvisational.
"Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850." This project involves a cultural history of improvisation as a mode of performance practised mainly by Italian poets (improvvisatori and improvvisatrici) during the Romantic era. My research focuses on the reception and influence of these performances throughout European literature and culture. I examine representations of improvisers in travel literature, journals, letters, reviews, essays, literary magazines, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works in order to show how the pan-European discourse about improvisation helps to form the concept of "Romantic genius" and to shape ideas about national and personal identity. In addition to a monograph and scholarly articles, outcomes include a web-accessible database of documents concerning poetic improvisers and improvisational performances during the period 1750-1850.
