Assistant Professor

Email: Stacey.McDowell@warwick.ac.uk

5.47 Faculty of Arts Building
University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

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About

I teach eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Before joining the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick, I held posts at Cambridge and Bristol.

My research focuses on poetry, literature and philosophy, reading studies, and sexuality and gender. I have a wider interest in pedagogy, mentorship and literary education - both historically and in the present. I have also been involved in teaching literature in schools and prisons.

My book, Shared Reading in Romantic Literature (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), focuses on representations of people reading together in the Romantic period and questions what they reveal about both reading and togetherness. Writers at the time often describe the act of sharing a book as a kind of litmus test of sympathy. Frequently, however, fictional readers end up misreading the text, or each other, or both. By uncovering the assumptions lying behind the metaphorical sense of reading as sympathy, Romantic writers reflect on ideas of reading – its private or social nature and its capacity to foster fellow feeling – while also suggesting something about the literary qualities intrinsic to sympathy itself – its hermeneutic, narrative, and rhetorical strategies. I consider what the literary portrayal of shared reading adds to understandings of the relationship between sympathy and reading provided by histories of the book and moral philosophy, and how the effects of form and style reproduce the shared experience of reading described.

I am also currently working on a new scholarly edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats for the Longman Annotated English Poets Series.

Selected Publications

'Ottava Rima's Transitional Moods', in The 1810s, edited by Emma Mason, part of the multi-volume series, 'Re-reading the Nineteenth Century', General Editors, Juliet John et al (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

‘Whispering Galleries, Echoes, and Literary Acoustics’, Literature and the Senses, ed. Annette Kern-Stähler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 144-61.

‘Walter Pater, Charles Lamb, and the Value of Reserve’, Walter Pater and the Development of English Studies, ed. Charles Martindale, Lene Østermark-Johansen and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 239-54.

‘Ann Yearsley and Habituated Indifference’, special issue on ‘Habit and Romanticism’, ed. Eliza Haughton-Shaw and Hannah Tran, The Cambridge Quarterly, 51:3 (2022), 258-76.

‘Wordsworth and Reading’s Promise’, Studies in Romanticism, 60:1 (2021), 57-78.

‘The Senses and Sensation’, in Keats in Context, edited by Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

‘Shiftiness in Keats’s “Ode on Indolence”’, Romanticism 23:1 (2017), 27-37

‘Rhyming and Undeciding in Wordsworth and Norman Nicholson’, Romanticism 23:2 (2017), 179-190

‘Reading Together’, Essays in Criticism 64 (2014), 351-372