Dr Rowan Boyson
Role:
Research Fellow
Subject:
English
Research:
Eighteenth-century and Romantic literature; literary and critical theory; history and theory of the ideas of pleasure and happiness.
Webpage:
Email:
rrb23 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk
Phone:
31327 (internal)
01223 331327 (external)
01223 331327 (external)
My work focuses on affect and the senses in the poetry and intellectual history of the long eighteenth century, and their significance for the philosophical and political culture of modernity. Some recent topics in my research include: the mobility of the term ‘pleasure’ for aesthetics and political philosophy; feminism’s ambivalent treatment of hedonism; ideas of Epicurean ataraxia in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Adorno; teleology and narrative in relation to the concept of ‘happiness’; liberal and neo-liberal understandings of Romanticism; the phenomenology of smell and its lyric and satiric applications.
I am currently working on a number of publications. I am putting the finishing touches to my first monograph, Common Pleasure: Wordsworth, Aesthetics and Political Philosophy, which is under contract for Cambridge University Press's Studies in Romanticism series and should be available in 2012. I have been undertaking research on the history and theory of smell, which will be the subject of my second book. With Tom Jones (University of St. Andrews) I am co-editing a collection provisionally entitled Poetry and the Enlightenment Science of Man, for which I have contributed an essay entitled ‘Shaftesbury’s Poetics’. I am also working on an article about the revival of interest in the reception of Epicurus and Lucretius and the implications of this for Romantic-period studies, especially in relation to Wordsworth’s Recluse project as a philosophical poetry of ‘retirement’. Finally, I am reviewing books for Nineteenth-Century Books Online and Cambridge Quarterly.
Publications
‘Pleasure, happiness and Romanticism: a critical survey’, Literature Compass 7:8 (2010), pp.651-658
‘Walking back to Happiness’, New Formations 63 (Winter 2007-8), pp.138-144
Review: Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century France and the New Epicureanism, forthcoming in Eighteenth Century Life.
‘Conference: Romanticism and Science, 15 September 2006, British Academy, London, BARS Bulletin and Review, 30 (October 2006), pp.20-21.
