Dr Michael J Sullivan
Tennyson: A Life in Manuscripts (Princeton University Press)
Among my current projects is the first book-length study of Tennyson’s manuscript revisions, and their role in the development of his style. Its chapters examine how Tennyson’s notebooks record a series of profound shifts in the style of English verse and versification, stretching from the Romantics to the end of the nineteenth century. Uncovering new manuscripts from Cambridge, Lincoln, and Harvard, the monograph traces how literary modes – from the lyric to the epic – were altered on the page, as new movements modified the conventions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Extensive archival research for this study was supported by a Rodney G. Dennis Visiting Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, Harvard, which gave me the resources to consult over 70 notebooks and 300 folders of Tennyson’s drafts and correspondence. Chapters arising from this research have been published in Essays in Criticism and Literary Imagination, and the resulting articles examine Tennyson’s selection of poems for The Golden Treasury (1861), the most influential lyric anthology of the nineteenth century. By considering the anthology’s fair copy alongside a rediscovered revision copy, the articles shed new light on Tennyson’s poetic influences, and on his aesthetic control over the formation of a Victorian literary canon.
OUP Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson & Journal Special Issues
I am General Editor of The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson for Oxford University Press, and have guest edited Special Issues of the Tennyson Research Bulletin (2020) and Victorian Poetry (2021). Since 2017, I have been an Executive Member of the Tennyson Society, and in 2019 I organised an international conference in Tennyson Studies at Christ Church, Oxford.
Recovery of Literary Manuscripts: Digital Humanities Project
Since 2021, I have been Principal Investigator of Recovery of Literary Manuscripts, a Digital Humanities project applying multispectral imaging to the study of modern anglophone literature. The project is developing new techniques to restore lost lines of literary manuscripts, revealing more of the world’s extant literature that has remained beyond the reach of critics. For more information, see https://www.recovery-of-literary-manuscripts.net.
Articles and Future Projects
I hold additional research interests in the development of genre in the nineteenth century, and in Byron, Shelley, the Brontës, the Brownings, Arnold, Wordsworth, and Keats. My thematic research interests include the development of the verse novel, print and manuscript cultures since 1700, lyric studies and the musicality of verse, the role of lyric anthologies in canon creation and periodisation, the origins and legacies of ‘Romanticism’, the influence of sceptical philosophy and aesthetics on English verse, Anglo-American intersections, editing and textual criticism, and temporality in narrative verse.
Dissertations supervised include work on Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, Hopkins’s religious orders, Keats and absence, and Tennyson and mourning.
I am currently writing Transnational Verse Forms: The Making of Stanzas in Modern Poetics (under contract, Cambridge University Press).
Background
Prior to arriving at St Catherine’s, I was a Research Fellow in English at Christ Church, Oxford, and held the Rodney G. Dennis Visiting Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts at Harvard. I completed my PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, after studying for the MPhil in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies, both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Before my postgraduate research, I graduated from the University of Durham, where I was a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar and winner of the T. W. Craik, Brooks Johnson, and J. R. Watson prizes. I was educated at state schools in Yorkshire, and contribute to access, outreach, and public engagement for literature and the humanities.
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