About the lecture

In this module, we think about the relationship between Romanticism and the concept of genre, focusing in particular on: (i) the view of writers such as Bryan Procter and William Wordsworth that genre was little more than ‘the capricious habits of former poets’ that stifled poetic creativity and expression; and (ii) the revival in this period of several poetic forms that had been neglected in the course of the 18th century (or longer), such as the ballad, the sonnet, and even the autobiography.

About the lecturer

Ross Wilson was born in Salford and brought up in north Manchester, where he attended Philips High School and Bury College. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing his doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. He held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a lectureship in Literature in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2009. He returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English and took up a fellowship at Trinity College. He is editor of Romantic Circles Reviews & Receptions and very occasionally tweets @RossWilso . In 2015-16 he is the Crausaz Wordsworth Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities.