Current Students

Lee Livingstone

My PhD project explores the interrelation of female authors and Lord Byron, gauging the influence and impact of women's literature on his work. My thesis is structured into case studies of specific female authors, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Madame de Staël, Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, assessing Byron’s readings, poetic engagements and criticisms of these authors’ works. The hope is that through exploring this selection of literary relationships this thesis will form a positive, open-ended discussion where the impact of women’s writing on Byron will be considered not as isolated moments in his oeuvre but as an expansive network of influence, which also includes Byron’s influence on women writers that followed him. In producing a more comprehensive analysis of Byron and women’s writing, this thesis will advance a new understanding of the ‘feminisation’ of culture in the Romantic period. In this way the thesis will not only be important to studies of Byron and of women’s writing more generally but will significantly enhance our understanding of wider issues of gender and cultural change in the Romantic period, in addition to continuing the work of feminist retrieval which remains a vital literary-historical project.

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/lee-livingstone(7668199b-2704-4b18-84ec-1e5e79f9f487).html

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ael

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/CentreforEighteenth-CenturyStudies/

Supervisory Team: Prof. Moyra Haslett, Arts, English and Languages (QUB), Dr Shaun Regan, Arts, English and Languages (QUB), Dr Sarah Wootton, English Studies (Durham).

Start Date: September 2017.