James Williams

Profile

Biography

I came to York in 2012 as Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and became Senior Lecturer in the same in 2019 before taking the rather broader title of Professor of English Literature in 2024.

Before joining the department, I was educated at my local state comprehensive school in West Yorkshire before reading English at St John’s College, Oxford and completing my Ph.D. at Trinity College, Cambridge. Immediately before coming to York, I taught for several years in Oxford.

My work is largely, but by no means exclusively, on poetry and generally centres on the long nineteenth century. Research interests include poetics, stylistics, allusion, translation, influence, nonsense writing, comedy, and wit.

In 2012 I was Visiting Fellow at the Houghton Library at Harvard University; in 2024 I held Visiting Fellowships at Keble College and St Catherine’s College in Oxford. I am a member of the Editorial Board of the OUP journal The Cambridge Quarterly.

Research

Overview

I enjoy writing on a range of authors and topics and across a fairly wide historical span. Two articles in 2024, both on “S. Smith”, roughly bookend the period in which I usually operate: one, in Essays in Criticism, on the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century clergyman and wit, Sydney Smith, and the other, in Cambridge Quarterly, on the mid-twentieth-century poet Stevie Smith.

Much of my work has been in the field of nineteenth-century poetry: recently published essays discuss Hopkins’s rhymes and Tennyson’s debts to Pope, and another close to completion explores the verse tragedy of Thomas Lovell Beddoes in relation to the comedy of Aristophanes. Edward Lear has been a major focus, resulting in a monograph, Edward Lear (Northcote House, 2018), and an essay collection, Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016), co-edited with Matthew Bevis (Oxford). My work on Lear speaks to a broader interest in nonsense which culminated in The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense (EUP, 2021), co-edited with Anna Barton (Sheffield). 

This, in turn, reflects a preoccupation with writing sometimes described, or dismissed, as “light”—the playful, the comedic, and the witty—which I have explored through close analyses of the formal intricacies of particular writers (Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy Parker) as well as exploratory essays on a wider canvas (“Parodies, Spoofs, and Satires” [1880-1920], Victorian comic verse).

Various other interests can be gleaned from my wider list of publications, including prose stylistics, religious and philosophical aspects of writing, and opera libretti. Invitations to contribute to academic symposia and essay collections sometimes present opportunities to follow private passions or explore new territory: currently in different stages of preparation are essays on the contemporary American writer Lydia Davis, and the role of association in art criticism.

At the heart of all my work is an interest in how literary language operates, why texts are written in the way they are and not some other way, and why it matters. These questions animate all my practice as a critic. I’m also interested in the activity of literary criticism itself: what possibilities, obligations, and forms of attention and understanding are continuous with or distinctive to it. These questions sometimes bring me into conversation with philosophers, psychoanalysts, art historians and theologians. The practice of editing, as distinct from but continuous with criticism, is increasingly important to me, as is working across languages and the philological imagination this involves. By that I mean the discipline of learning languages as a beginner every bit as much as the rewards of proficiency or mastery. My interest in languages influences my work as a critic and editor in a range of ways, some more obvious than others.

Projects

I am currently working on a monograph entitled The Ends of Wit: a cultural biography of wit from the nineteenth century to the present which explores the inner life of wit through close readings of individual wits from Sydney Smith to Fran Lebowitz. Alongside this I am putting together a study of the often subterranean and elusory ways in which allusion to classical mythology—so central to the mainstream tradition of English poetry from Chaucer—is reconfigured in the period between Romanticism and the threshold of Modernism.

My work on the latter book has been a catalyst for a wider project on allusion which will develop over the coming years, and a collection of essays is currently in preparation on poetic allusion in the long nineteenth century, co-edited with Jane Wright (Bristol).

Alongside these critical projects, I am working on an edition of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald.

Supervision

I have supervised a number of Ph.D. and M.Res. theses: current and past topics include repetitions in Tennyson, theological difficulties in Geoffrey Hill, Victorian magic lanterns, late-nineteenth-century queer erotica, and the long sentence in contemporary fiction. If you are developing a research proposal and think I might be a good fit as a supervisor, please feel free to explain why in an e-mail.