Staff Profiles

Modules taught

I am currently External Examiner on the BA English at Warwick University. 

Undergraduate Teaching

• Shakespeare
• Advanced Option: Poverty and the Novel
• Crime, Culture & Transgression
• Contemporary Literature

Postgraduate Teaching

• MA English Literature module: Romanticisms.
• I have supervised to completion the PhD theses of Dr Gregory Leadbetter on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2010), novelist Dr Morag Joss on writing, crime fiction and issues of genre (2014), and Dr Robin Schofield on Sara Coleridge (2016), and am currently supervising Megan Burns's doctoral work on working-class poetry from Glasgow’s Red Clydeside period. 
• I have examined a variety of PhDs on poetry of the eighteenth century, the Romantic period and creative writing.
• I have supervised MA and BA dissertations across literature of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, on Romanticism, Victorian poetry and fiction, contemporary fiction, and on themes such as class, the Gothic, masculinity, sexuality and nature. 

 

I teach and research Romantic-period literature and culture, ecology and literature, working-class literature (1800 to the present), textual criticism and critical theory (especially ecocriticism), and contemporary Scottish literature.

The highlights of my research include a study of contemporary Scottish novelist James Kelman, a campaign to challenge the private copyright to John Clare’s work in two collections of his poetry and associated publications, and my ongoing editorship of the John Clare Society Journal. I appeared recently in Andrew Kötting's feature film By Our Selves (2015), talking about Clare. In 2014 I organised the 150th anniversary conference on John Clare. The collection of original essays on John Clare I co-edited with Scott McEathron of Southern Illinois University, was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2015, and is now out in paperback. My monograph John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History, was published in September 2017 by Palgrave, and I discuss it here. I co-edited another collection of essays on Clare with Dr Erin Lafford (University of Derby), called Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, published in 2020. 

Currently, I am co-editing a paperback edition of Pierce Egan’s 1821 smash hit Life in London for Oxford World's Classics. A longer-term project I am working towards is a study of British literature and poverty, 1800-2000. 

Books

• Kövesi S, Lafford E, Ed., Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, Palgrave (2020)
  ISBN: 9783030433734 eISBN: 9783030433741
  Abstract

  This collection gathers together an exciting new series of critical essays on the Romantic- and Victorian-period poet John Clare, which each take a rigorous approach to both persistent and emergent themes in his life and work. Designed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, the scholarship collected here both affirms Clare’s importance as a major nineteenth-century poet and reveals how his verse continually provokes fresh areas of enquiry. Offering new archival, theoretical, and sometimes corrective insights into Clare’s world and work, the essays in this volume cover a multitude of topics, including Clare’s immersion in song and print culture, his formal ingenuity, his environmental and ecological imagination, his mental and physical health, and his experience of asylums. This book gives students a range of imaginative avenues into Clare’s work, and offers both new readers and experienced Clare scholars a vital set of contributions to ongoing critical debates.
  

  Website 
• Kövesi S, Ed., The meeting: reading and writing through John Clare, John Clare Society (2020)
  ISBN: 9781916135529
  Website 
• Kovesi S, John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History, Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
  ISBN: 9780230277878 eISBN: 9781349591831
  Abstract This book investigates what it is that makes John Clare’s poetic vision so unique, and asks how we use Clare for contemporary ends. It explores much of the criticism that has appeared in response to his life and work, and asks hard questions about the modes and motivations of critics and editors. Clare is increasingly regarded as having been an environmentalist long before the word appeared; this book investigates whether this ‘green’ rush to place him as a radical proto-ecologist does any disservice to his complex positions in relation to social class, work, agriculture, poverty and women. This book attempts to unlock Clare’s own theorisations and practices of what we might now call an ‘ecological consciousness’, and works out how his ‘ecocentric’ mode might relate to that of other Romantic poets. Finally, this book asks how we might treat Clare as our contemporary while still being attentive to the peculiarities of his unique historical circumstances. -- Supplied by publisher.Website 
• Kovesi S, Ed., New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community, Cambridge University Press (2015)
  ISBN: 9781107031111 eISBN: 9781316354957
  Abstract

  John Clare (1793–1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ‒ a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

  Website 
• Kovesi S, James Kelman, Manchester University Press (2007)
  ISBN: 9780719070976 eISBN: 9781847794857
  Website 
• Kovesi S, James Kelman, Manchester University Press (2007)
  ISBN: 9780719070976
  Abstract James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is the first book-length study of his groundbreaking novels, and it analyses and contextualizes each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. Richly historicized through diverse contexts such as Scottish socialism, public transport, emigration, 'Booker Prize' culture and Glasgow's controversial 'City of Culture' status in 1990, Simon Kovesi offers readings of Kelman's style, characterization and linguistic innovations. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist, and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicised literary tradition which transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. Kelman is cautious about the power relationship between the working-class worlds he represents in his fiction, and the latent preconceptions embedded in the language of academic and critical commentary. In response, this study is boldly self-critical, and questions the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert and politically necessary.
• Goodridge J, Keegan B, Christmas W, Burke T, Kovesi S, Ed., Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700-1800 (3 vols.), Pickering and Chatto (2003)
  ISBN: 9781851967582 eISBN: 9781781445471
  

Journal articles

• Kovesi S, 'John Clare's Horizons'
  Essays in Criticism 63 (4) (2013) pp.376-392
  ISSN: 0014-0856 eISSN: 1471-6852
  Abstract

  
  

  Website 
• Kovesi S, 'John Hamilton Reynolds, John Clare and The London Magazine'
  Wordsworth Circle 42 (3) (2011) pp.226-235
  ISSN: 0043-8006
  Abstract An essay is presented on the police report "The Literary Police Office," by Edward Herbert, which was published in the "The London Magazine" in the February 1823 issue. The report outlined the arrest of literary people, including poet John Clare. The author stresses his concern on the relationship of Clare with English poet John Hamilton Reynolds. She emphasizes the role of Reynolds as a host to the magazine and as a formative influence on Clare's early career.
• Kovesi S, 'Finding poems, making text: John Clare and the greening of textual criticism'
  Romanticism 17 (2) (2011) pp.135-147
  ISSN: 1354-991X
  Website 
• Kovesi S, 'An Uncatalogued Review of Poems Descriptive Dublin Inquisitor, January 1821'
  John Clare Society Journal 27 (2008) pp.73-80
  ISSN: 1356-7128
  Abstract

  
  

• Kovesi S, 'Beyond the Language Wars: Towards a Green Edition of John Clare'
  John Clare Society Journal 26 (2007) pp.61-75
  ISSN: 1356-7128
  Abstract

  
  

Book chapters

• Kövesi S, '"Lord Byron, poh! the man wot writes the werses?": John Clare, Byron and Class' in Bucknell, C Ward, M (ed.), Byron Among the English Poets, Cambridge University Press (2021)
  ISBN: 9781108842655 eISBN: 9781108903790
  Website 
• Kövesi S, '"Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? / Or Love in a golden bowl?" On not defending the humanities' in Eaglestone R, Marshall G (ed.), English: Shared Futures, Boydell and Brewer (2018)
  ISBN: 9781843845164 eISBN: 9781787443297
  Abstract

  While it certainly had a celebratory and affirmatory atmosphere, it is important to be clear that the English: Shared Futures conference was born of uncertainty about the future of English. That discipline-specific concern is a major constituent of ongoing debates about the state and status of the humanities and arts across English-speaking universities globally. So many ‘defence of the humanities’-style polemics have been written across the past few years, that I have long worried that our subjects are becoming defensive by default, nervous by character. Rather than resolving to be hard as nails in trying times, we are in danger of feeling institutionally, systemically, hard done by. In turn, I worry that our response as a community in English and beyond can appear grotesquely self-important and brittle. As a Head of Department – constantly concerned about getting student bums on lecture theatre seats – I wonder then about how attractive our subject might be to the wider world. How attractive is it to be seen as entrenched, defensive, or even arch? Does anyone want to come into English, or support it, because we moan about how embattled we are as we proclaim our own significance, cultural superiority and sheer status?

  It might be that some of what we do to argue for the humanities is self-harming. Self-declaring polemics that ‘defend the humanities’ penned by those who are ostensibly most secure in their profession – and I include myself in that bracket – might be damaging to those principles we in the humanities think we live and work by, though I hold those principles to be anything but homogenous.

  This essay is not a ‘defence’ of the humanities. I don't want to mount a ‘defence of the humanities’ because I do not wish to imply that my humanities-based critical practice is an inviolate, pristine militarised citadel, all classic lines and Doric columns, with barbed wire atop the private, inward-facing, excluding, college wall. I don't want the humanities to be a stolid assertion that is beyond critique. A ‘defence’ might imply that. It might also suggest that I have a secure idea of what it is I would be defending.

  Website 
• Kovesi S, 'The Rural Plural: Andrew Kötting, Iain Sinclair and John Clare' in By Our Selves, Badbloodandsibyl (2015)
  ISBN: 9780956873361
  
• Kovesi S, 'John Clare: Prize-Fighter' in By Our Selves, Badbloodandsibyl (2015)
  ISBN: 9780956873361
  
• Kövesi S, 'John Clare’s deaths: poverty, education and poetry' in Simon Kövesi, Scott McEathron (ed.), New Essays on John Clare: Poetry, Culture and Community, Cambridge University Press (2015)
  ISBN: 9781107031111 eISBN: 9781316354957
  Website 
• Kovesi S, 'John Clare & ... & ... & ... Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome' in Ecology and the literature of the British left: the red and the green, Ashgate (2012)
  eISBN: 1.409418221E9
  

Other publications

• Kötting A, Aylward D, Jones F, Jones T, Kötting E, Kövesi S, MacGillivray, Moore A, Sinclair I, Fletcher E, Finer J, Smith NG, West C, Ciompi P, Anonymous Bosch, 'By Our Selves'
  

  By Our Selves
  

  Director: Andrew Kötting

  Soda Pictures, 2015

  This feature film documents a four-day walk made by the English Poet John Clare. Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and a Straw Bear follow in his footsteps exactly 150 years after his death. En route they bump into Macgillivray, Dr Simon Kövesi and the wizard Alan Moore. The journey is narrated by Toby’s father Freddie, a maverick actor who featured in numerous David Lynch films. John Clare's escape from Epping Forest; an epic march through hunger and madness, is an English journey to set beside 'A Pilgrim's Progress'. Andrew Kötting, hyperkinetic camper-van captain of Gallivant, sets out in hot pursuit, dressed as a Straw Bear. Father and son, Freddie and Toby Jones, are possessed by the spirit of Clare, and locked in Beckettian embrace: one all-voice and one all-mute. The writer Iain Sinclair watches from the shadows, Alan Moore waits like a bearded figure of fate, in Northampton and Dr Simon Kövesi hands out the medicine. Inspired by Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison and John Clare’s Journey out of Essex.
  

  UK theatrical release by Soda Pictures 2 October, 2015. (R/T 83 min, Cert: 15).
  

  () Website 

Membership of professional bodies

I am a Fellow of the English Association, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an Honorary Lifetime Member of the British Association for Romantic Studies and a Trustee of the registered charity the John Clare Society.

Conferences

Recent Conference Papers and Talks

• After Wordsworth: Water, Writing, invited speaker, University of Leicester, 8 January 2021.
• Romantic Facts and Fantasies, British Association for Romantic Studies, University of Nottingham, 25-28 July 2019.
• Byron Among the Poets, invited speaker, All Souls College, University of Oxford, 13-14 January 2018
• Romantic Improvement, British Association for Romantic Studies, York, 27-30 July 2017
• English: Shared Futures, Newcastle, 5-7 July 2017
• Oxford University Romantic Research Seminar: Screening of By Our Selves. followed by Q&A with Fiona Stafford, Balliol, 21 Nov 2016
• Keynote Speaker, Romantic Voices, British Asssociation for Romantic Studies Early Career and Postgraduate 2016 Conference, Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 22-23 June 2016
• Modern Language Association, Annual Convention, Texas, USA, 8-11 Jan 2016
• Unencompassing the Archipelago, Somerville College Oxford, 14 Nov 2015
• British Association for Romantic Studies, Cardiff, 16-19 July 2015
• Modern Language Association, Annual Convention, Vancouver, Canada, 8-11 December 2015
• John Clare in Space, Oxford Brookes University, 30-31 May 2014
• James Kelman and the City, University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art, 8 October 2011.
• Enlightenment, Romanticism & Nation, University of Glasgow, 28-31 July 2011.
• Romantic Circulations, Roehampton University, 23-26 July 2009.
• Class and the Canon: Allusion, Authority and Working-Class Literature, 1780-1900, University of Glasgow, 19 April, 2008.
• The Red and the Green: Ecology and the Literature of the Left, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 16-18 March, 2007.
• Modern Language Association, Annual Convention, Philadelphia, USA, 27-30 December 2006.
• Romanticism, Environment, Crisis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 23-27 June 2006.
• Romanticism's Debatable Lands, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 28-31 July 2005.
• Romantic Conflict, University of Warwick, 24-27 July 2003.

Recent guest research seminar papers delivered at:

Langdyke Countryside Trust; Museum of English Rural Life, Reading; Edge Hill University; Magdalene College, Oxford (Romantic Realignments Seminar); University of Sheffield; University of Reading; Hertford College, Oxford (Romantic Realignments Seminar); Lancaster University; Keele University; University of Glasgow; University College London; University of the West of England; University of Greenwich.

Press, publicity and reviews

Editorships

• Editor, John Clare Society Journal (2008-)
• Editorial Board, The Drouth
• Reviews Editor, Bulletin & Review of the British Association for Romantic Studies (2002-10)

 

Sample Reviews

• James Kelman, Mo said she was quirky, The Independent, 28 July 2012
• Roger Garfitt,The Horseman's Word: A Memoir, The Independent, 3 June 2011
• Hugh Lupton, The Ballad of John Clare, The Independent, 3 December 2010
• James Kelman, If It Is Your Life, The Independent, 23 April 2010
• Suhayl Saadi, Joseph's Box, The Independent, 13 September 2009
• Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, The Independent, 29 May 2009
• John Burnside, Glister, The Independent, 5 June 2008
• James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy, The Independent, 25 April 2008
• Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography, The Independent, 10 October 2003

I have also reviewed for: European Journal of English Studies; Romanticism; Journeys: The International Journal of Travel Writing; John Clare Society Journal; TLS; Bulletin & Review of the British Association for Romantic Studies.