Dr Madeleine Callaghan

School of English

Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature

Maddy Callaghan
Profile picture of Maddy Callaghan
m.callaghan@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 8461

Full contact details

Dr Madeleine Callaghan
School of English
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Profile

I joined the School of English in September 2010 and I’m a senior lecturer in Romantic Literature. My primary research interest is the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in other Romantic poets and prose writers, Milton and Spenser, and in twentieth-century British and Irish poetry.

I read English at Durham University and stayed in Durham for my Masters and PhD. My monograph on Shelley, entitled Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, came out in 2017, and my second monograph, entitled The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley, came out in 2019. With Michael O’Neill, I co-edited Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (2011), and we also co-authored The Romantic Poetry Handbook (2018). I co-edited Romanticism and the Letter with Anthony Howe in 2020.

My most recent book is Eternity in British Romantic Poetry (2022). By way of an overview, the monograph, Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. This monograph will offer an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the period: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The aims of the project are two-fold: firstly, to analyse the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse, and afterlife, to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, in opening up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity, it challenges the assumption that the Romantic age should be considered through a contextual rather than a conceptual lens.

Research interests

My primary area of interest is Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and I have written extensively about the poetry of the Romantic period, particularly on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Yeats. I also have research interests in Milton, Coleridge, and in post-war British, American, and Irish poetry, particularly that of Louis MacNeice and John Berryman. I am particularly interested in the role and responsibility of the poet from the Romantic period to the present day. This was a point of serious debate in the Romantic period, from Shelley's sense of the “unacknowledged legislator” to Byron's mocking yet intense questioning of the place of poetry and the poet in culture. My work pays close attention to the workings of poetry to consider the contested significance and singularity of the poet to their culture.

My new project, Such Liars: Romantic Period Poetry and the Truth, examines poetry’s relationship with truth via means of close analysis and philosophical debate. The project’s aims are two-fold. Firstly, to examine why the relationship between poetry and the truth is so persistently debated by tracing the changing conception of the role of the poet in relation to the truth. Secondly, in pioneering a richer range of thinking about the relationship between poetry and truth, it will consider the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic to reimagine and communicate it in innovative ways for diverse audiences. There are three key research questions that this project will seek to explore: How does poetry understand truth and what kind of truth does it speak? What stance do Romantic and pre- Romantic poets and philosophers take towards poetry’s relationship with truth? In what way does Romantic-period poetry conceive of the idea of truth-telling?

Publications

Books

  • Callaghan M (2022) Eternity in British Romantic Poetry. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2019) The Poet-Hero in the Work of Byron and Shelley. London: Anthem Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • O'Neill M & Callaghan M (2017) The Romantic Poetry Handbook. John Wiley & Sons. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2017) Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays. Liverpool University Press. View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download
  • O'Neill M & Callaghan M (2011) Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry. Wiley-Blackwell. RIS download Bibtex download

Edited books

  • (Ed.) (2020) Romanticism and the Letter. Springer International Publishing. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M, O'Neill M & Howe A (Eds.) (2013) The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. RIS download Bibtex download

Journal articles

Chapters

  • Callaghan M (2021) 'I ne'er mistake you for a personal foe': Byron and Wordsworth, BYRON AMONG THE ENGLISH POETS (pp. 131-144). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2020) Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and the Limits of Letters, Romanticism and the Letter (pp. 183-198). Springer International Publishing RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M & Howe A (2020) Introduction: Romanticism and the Letter In Callaghan M & Howe A (Ed.), Romanticism and the Letter (pp. 1-14). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M & Howe A (2020) Romanticism and the Letter: Introduction, Romanticism and the Letter (pp. 1-14). Springer International Publishing RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M & Wright A (2020) “Gothic Romanticism and the Summer of 1816.” In Wright A & Townshend D (Ed.), The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 19-40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2019) The Lake Poets In Tuite C (Ed.), Byron in Context (pp. 190-196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2017) Letters In O'Neill M (Ed.), John Keats in Context (pp. 66-74). Cambridge University Press View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2016) ‘Strong Ghosts’: Romantic Presences in Yeats’s Poetry, Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Routledge RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2015) 'Any thing human or earthly': Shelley's letters and poetry, Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop (pp. 111-125). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2013) Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity, Legacies of Romanticism (pp. 149-164). Routledge RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2012) Shelley and Milton In Callaghan M, O'Neill M & Howe A (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (pp. 478-494). Oxford: Oxford University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2012) ‘Strong Ghosts’: Romantic Presences in Yeats’s Poetry In Sandy M (Ed.), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (pp. 27-42). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M (2012) Louis MacNeice and the Struggle for Romantic Identity In Casaliggi C & March-Russell P (Ed.), The Legacies of Romanticism Routledge RIS download Bibtex download
  • Callaghan M () What More is There to Say ? Yeats’s Questions In Bonapfel EM, Faulkner M, Gutierrez J & Lennard J (Ed.), A History of Punctuation in English Literature [three volumes] RIS download Bibtex download

Presentations

  • Callaghan M “Byron and Shelley in 1816.”. New York Public Library. RIS download Bibtex download
Research group

I supervise and have been primary supervisor for several successful doctoral theses. These include work on Keats and pleasure and pain (funded by the Wolfson Foundation), Percy Bysshe Shelley and androgyny, pastoral poetry in the Romantic period, the second-generation Romantic poets and quest (AHRC funded) and a thesis on Owen and the Romantic elegiac tradition (funded by WRoCAH), as well as secondary supervising a number of other projects. I am interested in supervising PhD candidates in any of my research interests, especially in Romantic or post-Romantic poetry.

Teaching activities

My research and teaching interests are closely related. I teach on the English Literature BA course and various Masters programmes. Modules that I contribute to at undergraduate level include "Romanticism to Modernism,” “The Invention of Romanticism,” plus my approved module for finalists, “Life After Death? Romantic Poets and Writing the Afterlife”

At postgraduate level, I am a member of the teaching team for various courses on the Masters degree, and co-convene (with Dr Anna Barton) two modules, "Love and Lyric" and "I want a hero: Romantic and Victorian Epic."