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Dr Sally Bushell

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Degree: BA London; MA York; PGCE Cambridge; PhD Cambridge

Current Teaching

My main area of teaching is Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Romantic Literature. I currently convene the British Romanticism course for undergraduates and teach a specialist third year course on textual process entitled "Where do Poems Come from?" At graduate level I teach one module for the MA in Romantic and Victorian Studies: "On Location inthe Lakes" and one on the Contemporary Literary Studies MA: "Contemporary Poetry: The Living Tradition". I also run a number of the research training sessions for graduates.

Research Interests

Dr Sally Bushell BA (London), MA (York), MA (Lancaster), PhD (Cambridge), PGCE (Cambridge), is senior lecturer and co-director of the Wordsworth Centre. Publications include Re-Reading The Excursion (Ashgate, 2002); The Excursion ([co-edited] Cornell University Press, 2007); and Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (University Press of Virginia, 2009). She has undertaken a collaborative pilot project with The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, putting Wordsworth's manuscripts online for the first time. She is also General Editor (with Isobel Armstrong) of a new Reading Guides to Long Poems Series with Edinburgh University Press.

Dr Bushell's second critical book,Text as Process: Exploring Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Emily Dickinson(2009), connects literary critical with text-critical and philosophical ideas about poetic creativity and composition and aims to open up manuscript material to more creative critical interpretation. It is concerned with defining new ways of responding to text as process, or the "coming into being" of the literary work and with opening up draft materials to a wider readership. A second area of research interest concerns the relationship of place, space and poetry as embodied in the manuscript object. In 2007 Dr Bushell explored such ideas in her own research through an AHRC funded collaborative project with The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. This project is primarily concerned with putting the manuscripts online in an accessible form. Click here for more details.

When not at work she spends her time: reading and writing poetry; taking black and white photographs; walking in the Lake District; and swimming in the sea.

Recent and Current postgraduate students:

Loren Cafferty, "Wordsworth and the Development of Moral Poetry." (MA by Research 2002-3).

David Cooper, "The Poetics of Place and Space: An Approach to the Writing of Norman Nicholson." (PhD. 2004 - ).

Zoe Bolton, "Imaginative Geography: Cross-Generic Space and Representations of Place from Gray to Byron" (PhD 2005-).

Andrew King, "Space and Place in The Mythology of Shelley and Keats" (PhD 2008-)

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I am interested in receiving proposals from doctoral students in two main areas. My recent research has been concerned with place, space and poetry/ poetics - largely, but not exclusively, in relation to Romantic literature and the Lakes, so I would welcome studies in this area. I am also very interested in the study of textual process and the draft materials which precede the published work. I would therefore welcome projects on textual criticism, genetic criticism and the study of manuscripts for nineteenth or twentieth century literature where relevant. I have a secondary interest in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. More traditionally I am able to supervise projects on Romantic writers, particularly Wordsworth.

Associated Keywords: Manuscripts, Place-writing, Poetry, Romanticism, Textual criticism, Wordsworth, Wordsworth Trust

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