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Dr Simon Marsden

Teaching Fellow

Research Interests

Simon Marsden gained his doctorate at Lancaster University in 2005 and his since taught at Lancaster, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Cumbria. He has taught widely in the fields of Romantic and nineteenth-century literature and in literature and film. He is currently teaching on ENGL 203: Victorian Literature and ENGL 204: American Literature to 1900.

Simon's research focuses on the interactions of literature, religions and philosophies of science and secularity. He is currently completing a monograph that reads the works of Emily Brontë in the context of recent theoretical approaches to secularity and the dialogic text. This book argues that Brontë's poetry and novel embody hermeneutic conflicts as multiple speakers seek to establish their own readings of the world in the context of a secular culture in which all interpretations, all readings, are contested. Brontë's characters negotiate the multiple positions of faith lived as immediate reality and the anticipation of eschatological fulfilment; an anticipation that is always in tension with alternative narratives of fulfilment.

Simon also has research interests in contemporary literature and the Gothic. He is currently developing projects on consciousness as sacred space in the work of Marilynne Robinson and on theology in contemporary vampire fictions.

Publications

''Vain are the Thousand Creeds': Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism', Literature and Theology 20.3 (2006), 236-50.

'Imagination, Materiality and the Act of Writing in Emily Brontë's Diary Papers', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28.1 (2006), 35-47.

'Dr Moreau's Crimes: H. G. Wells and the Victorian Vivisection Controversy', in Amanda Mordavsky Caleb (ed.), (Re)Creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 116-129.

'A Spiritual Geography of Wuthering Heights', in Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate (eds.), Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 65-78.

Associated Keyword: English

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