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Assoc Prof Will Christie

A/Prof Will Christie

DPhil Oxf. BA
Chair of Department (from January 2010)
A20 John Woolley Building (A20), room S343

+61 2 9351 2374



Research Areas

  • British Romantic literature and culture
  • Poetry and poetics
  • Shakespeare in critical and cultural history

Research Groups

ARC Project 2008 - 2010

A Critical Investigation into the Life and Writings of Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850)

Current Research Projects

  • The Edinburgh Review in early nineteenth-century literary culture
  • The life and correspondence of Francis Jeffrey
  • 'Eating Their Words': a study of literary influence
  • A literary biography of Dylan Thomas
  • The novels of Jane Austen

Professional Associations

  • Member of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA)
  • Member of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
  • Member of the Jane Austen Society of Australia (JASA)
  • Member of the Byron Society of Australia
  • Member of the Dylan Thomas Society of Australia (president 1998-2002, 2004-5; currently vice-president)

Selected Publications

Books

  • The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009)
  • (ed.), The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008).
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) [winner of the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship 2008]
  • Under Mulga Wood (Sydney: Mumford and More, 2004)

Articles and Chapters on Books

  • “Francis Jeffrey in Recent Whig Interpretations of Romantic Literary History”, ELH, LXXVI (2009), pp. 577-97.
  • “‘Wars of the Tongue’ in Post-War Edinburgh: On Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Its Campaign against the Edinburgh Review”, Romanticism, XV (July 2009), pp. 95-108.
  • “Coleridge, Austen, and the Two Romanticisms”, in Ways of Teaching: Papers from the English Association Teachers’ Conference 2009, ed. Richard Madelaine (Sydney: English Association, 2009), pp. 79-95.
  • “‘Trifling Deviation’: Stage and Screen Versions of Mary Shelley’s Monster”, in Victorian Turns, Neo Victorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture, ed. Penny Gay, Judith Johnston, and Catherine Waters (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 158-70.
  • “First Impressions; or, The Portrait]]: Art and Architecture in Pride and Prejudice”, in New Directions: Papers from the English Association Teachers’ Conference 2008, ed. Richard Madelaine (Sydney: English Association, 2008), pp. 61-73.
  • “Jane Austen and the John Murray Archive”, Sensibilities (Journal of the Jane Austen Society of Australia), XXXVI (June 2008), pp. 5-19.
  • “Superflux and Silence in Shakespeare’s King Lear”, Sydney Studies in English, XXXIII (2007), pp. 1-18.
  • “The Story of Samuel Rogers and His Poetry”, in Bulletin of the Byron Society in Australia, vol. XXXI (2007), pp. 7-27.
  • “Coleridge and Wordsworth in Pandaemonium”, Sydney Studies in English, XXXI (2005), pp. 109-20.
  • “‘HIMSELF, ALONE’: Coleridge in Isolation”, Metaphor, 3 (2005), pp. 15-25.
  • “Essays, Newspapers, and Magazines”, in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 426-444.
  • “State Patronage and the Romantic Writer: Henry Taylor’s Modest Proposal” in Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing 1750-1850, ed. E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin, and Peter Garside (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 218-36.
  • “A Recent History of Poetic Difficulty”, English Literary History LXVII (2000), pp. 539-564.
  • “The Critical Metamorphoses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, Sydney Studies in English XXV (1999), pp. 47-82.
  • “Going Public: Print Lords Byron and Brougham”, Studies in Romanticism, XXXVIII (Fall 1999), pp. 443-75.
  • twenty six entries in Iain McCalman (gen. ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832 (Oxford University Press, 1999.)
  • “Running with the English Hare and Hunting with the Scotch Bloodhounds”, The Byron Journal XXV (1997), pp. 23-31
  • “Byron and Francis Jeffrey”, The Byron Journal, XXV (1997), pp. 32-43
  • “Pride, Politics, and Prejudice”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts XX, no.3 (Winter 1997), pp. 313-334.
  • “The Printer's Devil in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria”, Prose Studies XIX, no.1 (April 1996), pp. 37-54.
  • “Reading Romanticism”, Literature and Aesthetics , VI (October 1996), pp. 120-31.
  • "Despondency and Madness": Shelley in Conversation with Byron in Julian and Maddalo", The Byron Journal XXI (1993), pp. 43-60.
  • "Francis Jeffrey's Associationist Aesthetics”, British Journal of Aesthetics XXXIII, no. 3 (July 1993), p. 257-269.

Areas of Teaching and Specific Topics

  • British Romantic Literature, 1780-1830
  • Eighteenth-Century Literature
  • Jane Austen and her Contemporaries
  • Critical Theory and Literary Practice
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Novel into Film
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