Dr Madeleine Callaghan

School of English

Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature

Maddy Callaghan
Profile picture of Maddy Callaghan
m.callaghan@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 8461
Jessop West

Full contact details

Dr Madeleine Callaghan
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Profile

I joined the School of English in September 2010 and Im a senior lecturer in Romantic Literature. My primary research interest is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in other Romantic poets and prose writers, Milton and Spenser, and in twentieth-century British and Irish poetry.

I read English at Durham University and stayed in Durham for my Masters and PhD. My monograph on Shelley, entitled Shelleys Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, came out in 2017, and my second monograph, entitled The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley, came out in 2019. With Michael ONeill, I co-edited Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and we also co-authored The Romantic Poetry Handbook (2018). I co-edited Romanticism and the Letter with Anthony Howe in 2020.

My most recent book is Eternity in British Romantic Poetry (2022). By way of an overview, the monograph, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. This monograph will offer an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the period: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The aims of the project are two-fold: firstly, to analyse the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse, and afterlife, to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, in opening up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity, it challenges the assumption that the Romantic age should be considered through a contextual rather than a conceptual lens.

Research interests

My primary area of interest is Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and I have written extensively about the poetry of the Romantic period, particularly on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in Milton, Coleridge, and in post-war British, American, and Irish poetry, particularly that of Louis MacNeice and John Berryman. I am particularly interested in the role and responsibility of the poet from the Romantic period to the present day. This was a point of serious debate in the Romantic period, from Shelley's sense of the unacknowledged legislator to Byron's mocking yet intense questioning of the place of poetry and the poet in culture. My work pays close attention to the workings of poetry to consider the contested significance and singularity of the poet to their culture.

My new project is to prepare a new edition of Percy Bysshe Shelleys work for the 21st Century Oxford Authors series. In 2024, I took up the the Carr-Thomas-Ovenden Visiting Fellowship at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University to support the edition. This new edition will present selections of the poetry, drama, letters, and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley for twenty-first century readers: scholars, postgraduates, undergraduates, and the general reader. This new edition provides a new breadth of selected poetry, detailed transcription, and comprehensively annotated texts, for which research in the Bodleian Special Collections is essential. It will contain newly edited versions of the selected texts and reveal the range and diversity of Shelleys career as a poet, reading Shelley as a multi-faceted artist whose work spans a plethora of genres, themes, and concepts, and thus re-orientating readers understanding of Shelley from single issue interpretations.

Publications

Books

  • Callaghan M (2022) Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. Liverpool University Press.
  • Callaghan M (2019) . London: Anthem Press.
  • O'Neill M & Callaghan M (2017) The Romantic Poetry Handbook. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Callaghan M (2017) Shelleys living artistry: Letters, poems, plays (Introduction and chapters 5 and 8). Liverpool University Press.
  • O'Neill M & Callaghan M (2011) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Wiley-Blackwell.

Edited books

  • Callaghan M & Howe A (Ed.) (2020) . Springer International Publishing.
  • Callaghan M, O'Neill M & Howe A (Eds.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Journal articles

  • Callaghan M (2024) . The Byron Journal, 52(1), 65-80.
  • Callaghan M (2024) . The Wordsworth Circle, 55(1), 89-108.
  • Callaghan M (2024) . ELH: English Literary History, 91(1), 181-206.
  • Callaghan M (2023) . European Romantic Review, 34(6), 689-710.
  • Callaghan M (2023) Teaching Byron and Shelley to sing: Thomas Moores lyric example. Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 23.
  • Callaghan M (2023) . Essays in Criticism, 73(1), 30-52.
  • Callaghan M (2023) . Textual Practice, 37(12), 1981-1999.
  • Callaghan M (2022) . Studies in Romanticism, 61(3), 405-427.
  • Callaghan M (2021) . The Review of English Studies, 72(307), 955-973.
  • Callaghan M (2020) . SEL Studies in English Literature, 60(4), 717-737.
  • Callaghan M (2019) . Irish Studies Review, 27(2), 177-194.
  • Callaghan M (2018) . Essays in Criticism, 68(3), 308-326.
  • Callaghan M (2017) . COUNTERTEXT-A JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE POST-LITERARY, 3(2), 209-210.
  • Callaghan M (2017) . Romanticism, 23(2), 155-165.
  • Callaghan M (2017) Byron and Shelleys Poetry of 1816. The Wordsworth Circle, 48(1), 26-32.
  • Callaghan M (2017) Laon and Cythna. Keats-Shelley Journal, 66, 186-187.
  • Callaghan M (2015) . English, 64(245), 81-98.
  • Callaghan M (2015) Shelley and the Ambivalence of Idealism. Keats-Shelley Journal, 64, 92-104.
  • Callaghan M (2013) . Romanticism, 19(2), 220-221.
  • Callaghan M (2012) Romantic 'Anglo-Italians': Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle. KEATS-SHELLEY REVIEW, 26(1), 75-77.
  • Callaghan M (2011) Shelley's Music: Fantasy, Authority, and the Object Voice. KEATS-SHELLEY REV(26), 181-182.
  • Callaghan M (2011) The Poetics of Perception in Southey's The Curse of Kehama and Byron's The Giaour. WORDSWORTH CIRCLE, 42(1), 38-41.
  • Callaghan M (2010) . Keats Shelley Review, 24, 38-52.
  • Callaghan M (2010) . The Byron Journal, 38(2), 125-134.

Book chapters

  • Callaghan M (2021) In Bucknell C & Ward M (Ed.), Byron Among the English Poets: Literary Tradition and Poetic Legacy (pp. 131-144). Cambridge University Press
  • Callaghan M (2020) , Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (pp. 183-198). Springer International Publishing
  • Callaghan M & Howe A (2020) In Callaghan M & Howe A (Ed.), Romanticism and the Letter (pp. 1-14). Palgrave Macmillan
  • Callaghan M & Wright A (2020) , The Cambridge History of the Gothic (pp. 19-40). Cambridge University Press
  • Callaghan M (2019) In Tuite C (Ed.), Byron in Context (pp. 190-196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Callaghan M (2017) In O'Neill M (Ed.), John Keats in Context (pp. 66-74). Cambridge University Press
  • Callaghan M (2016) , Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Routledge
  • Callaghan M (2015) 'Any thing human or earthly': Shelley's letters and poetry, Letter Writing Among Poets from William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (pp. 111-125).
  • Callaghan M (2013) , Legacies of Romanticism (pp. 149-164). Routledge
  • Callaghan M (2012) Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity In Casaliggi C & March-Russell P (Ed.), The Legacies of Romanticism Routledge
  • Callaghan M (2012) Strong Ghosts: Romantic Presences in Yeatss Poetry In Sandy M (Ed.), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..
  • Callaghan M (2012) Shelley and Milton In Callaghan M, O'Neill M & Howe A (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (pp. 478-494). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Callaghan M () What More is There to Say ? Yeatss Questions In Bonapfel EM, Faulkner M, Gutierrez J & Lennard J (Ed.), A History of Punctuation in English Literature [three volumes]

Presentations

  • Callaghan M Byron and Shelley in 1816.. New York Public Library.
Research group

I supervise and have been primary supervisor for several successful doctoral theses. These include work on Keats and pleasure and pain (funded by the Wolfson Foundation), Percy Bysshe Shelley and androgyny, pastoral poetry in the Romantic period, the second-generation Romantic poets and quest (AHRC funded) and a thesis on Owen and the Romantic elegiac tradition (funded by WRoCAH), as well as secondary supervising a number of other projects. I am interested in supervising PhD candidates in any of my research interests, especially in Romantic or post-Romantic poetry.

Teaching activities

My research and teaching interests are closely related. I teach on the English Literature BA course and various Masters programmes. Modules that I contribute to at undergraduate level include "Romanticism to Modernism, The Invention of Romanticism, plus my approved module for finalists, Life After Death? Romantic Poets and Writing the Afterlife

At postgraduate level, I am a member of the teaching team for various courses on the Masters degree, and co-convene (with Dr Anna Barton) two modules, "Love and Lyric" and "I want a hero: Romantic and Victorian Epic."

Professional activities and memberships

I am a joint president of the International Association of Byron Societies (with Maria Schoina and Peter Francev)

I am one of the lead coordinators of the at the University of Sheffield