Alexander Freer

Lecturer in Romanticism

Contact details

Address

Street

School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures
50 George Square
Edinburgh

City
Post code

Availability

  • Office Hours outside of the semester: please email to arrange an appointment.

Biography

Background

I studied at the universities of Warwick (BA) and Cambridge (MPhil, PhD). Before coming to Edinburgh in 2023, I held a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught at Cambridge and the University of East Anglia.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Romantic literature
  • Literary criticism and theory
  • Poetry and poetics

Postgraduate teaching

Please feel free to contact me regarding supervision on any topics listed under my research interests. I particularly welcome theoretically-informed projects on Romantic literature, and critical projects engaging problems of ethics, phenomenology, affect, or aesthetics.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

  • Romanticism
  • Poetry and poetics
  • Literary theory, 18th century to present
  • Economics and literature

 

My recent work includes an essays on Shelley and lyric theory in Modern Philology, on Letitia Landon and the literary cliché in ELH, and an account of Romanticism's 'small ethics' in PMLA. For a full list of publications see here: Publications.

Current research interests

Romantic period poetry and prose (at the moment especially Godwin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Landon, De Quincey, Henry Kirke White); literary theory (aesthetics; psychoanalysis; queer theory; history of sexuality; phenomenology; ethics); economics and literature (debt; forgiveness; risk).

Past research interests

My first book, Wordsworth's Unremembered Pleasure (OUP, 2020) argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions.
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