Owen Holland
Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Email: owen.holland@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 4.25
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Background
Qualifications
University of Cambridge, 2015: PhD in English Literature
University of Sussex, 2010: MA in Critical Theory
University of Cambridge, 2008: BA in English Literature
Research summary
Owen Holland's research pursues historically contextualised and cultural materialist approaches to the literature and culture of Britain during the long nineteenth century. His recent book (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines literary responses to the Paris Commune of 1871, extending earlier work on fin-de-siècle cultural politics by exploring the global contexts of literary production in Victorian Britain. His research on British responses to the Commune encompasses discussion of several writers, including George Gissing, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James 'B.V.' Thomson and various others. His earlier monograph draws on a range of critical theorists of utopia to advance a new interpretation of William Morris’s utopianism as a strategic extension of his political writing, arguing that the play of topical and historical allusion in Morris’s utopianism is not merely incidental but structurally crucial to its form and function.
More broadly, he is interested in fin-de-siècle cultural politics, utopian studies, intersections of aesthetics and politics, as well as literary and critical theory. He is currently developing new research projects on 1.) nineteenth-century heliotropic poetics and 2.) the nature of the relationship between utopia and nineteenth-century novelistic realism.
Project activity
Owen edits The William Morris Society's scholarly journal, and, in this capacity, he has assisted in organising public events. Recent events include a symposium on the Kelmscott Press and its Legacies, held at the St Bride Foundation in London in November 2021.
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“Lovescape crucified”: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s red letter and “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
In:
Textual Practice, pp. 1-22
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2112066
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Literature and Revolution: British Responses to the Paris Commune
(240 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978821965
Research output: › Book (Published) -
'“These Christs that die upon the barricades”: Victorian Responses to the Paris Commune”
(19 pages)
In:
BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
On France: Revolutions and communes
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501351143.0009
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Morris and Marxist theory
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
William Morris: How I Became a Socialist
Research output: › Book (Published) -
“Thy sun, Revolution, is winning its noon”: Political Symbolism in Arnold, Clough and Chartist poetry
In:
Victorian Poetry, vol. 57, pp. 297–320
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2019.0014
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
“It had to come back”: The Paris Commune and H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes
(31 pages)
In:
ELH: English Literary History, vol. 86, pp. 525–554
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2019.0013
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
William Morris's Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration
Research output: › Book (Published) -
From the Place Vendôme to Trafalgar Square: Imperialism and counter-hegemony in the 1880s Romance revival
(18 pages)
In:
Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, vol. 14, pp. 98–115
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Spectatorship and entanglement in Thoreau, Hawthorne, Morris and Wells
In:
Utopian Studies, vol. 27, pp. 28–52
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.27.1.0028
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Revisiting Morris’s socialist internationalism: Reflections on translation and colonialism (with an annotated bibliography of translations of News from Nowhere, 1890-1915)
(27 pages)
In:
Journal of William Morris Studies, vol. 21, pp. 26–53
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)