Robert Irvine

Reader in Scottish Literature

Biography

Background

Bob Irvine holds an Honours MA in English and Philosophy from the University of Aberdeen, and a PhD from Edinburgh. He taught at Brunel University in London before returning to his current post in 1999.

Postgraduate teaching

My ongoing commitment in this area is to organising and teaching on our taught MSc programme, 'Literature and Society 1688-1900'. I am always happy to give advice on PhD proposals in my area of interest: see under 'Research'.

Research summary

Dr Irvine’s doctoral thesis was on gender and genre in the novels of Walter Scott, looking at Scott’s creative engagement, in his fiction, with the female-authored domestic novel of his time.

His current interests lie in the relation between literature (particularly fiction) and political ideas (particularly ‘liberal’ ones, broadly conceived) from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth; and especially in Scottish writers in this period. Questions of gender and class and the interrelation of those two categories remain a recurring concern.

Dr Irvine welcomes research proposals in any area that overlaps with the above.

Project activity

Dr Irvine is currently updating his edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for Broadview Press, and working on an edition of John Galt's Annals of the Parish (1821), one of the first volumes of a new Edinburgh University Press edition of selected work by Galt; both of these should be published in the course of 2020.

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