Chris Bundock

Biography

Most of my research is rooted in the transitional period circa 1780 - 1830 typically identified as “Romanticism.” Within this aesthetic and cultural moment I’m particularly interested in how British and European culture understood itself as historical in new—and newly urgent—ways. In my first book, Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism, I focused this inquiry by looking specifically at the paradoxical ways in which Romantic poets, novelists, philosophers, and cultural actors turn to prophecy in an effort to clarify historical and political incoherence. What the research reveals is that prophecy does not, however, tend to function, as we might expect it to, in a conservative, regulative, predictive way. In fact, it becomes prophecy’s pattern of complete and repeated failure that proves most productive for Romantics as a way to stage new possibilities for the future, possibilities that are unformed and yet promise to move humanity beyond existing social impasses. This negative, purgative quality of prophecy parallels my interest in the Gothic as a mode of writing that tests the limits of symbolization. The 18th-century Gothic functions as a kind of closet for storing experiences too inchoate, incoherent, perverse, or socially inappropriate to exist in “proper” culture. William Blake’s Gothic Sensibility, a collection of essays I’m editing for Manchester University Press, focuses on how the English artist, engraver, and poet William Blake helps re-define the Gothic from a basically architectural concern to a genre intimately related to affect, sexuality, deformation, and the dark side of the imagination.

Research Interest

Aesthetics; British Romanticism, especially Baillie, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and the Shelleys; corporeality, affect, and sensation in literary and scientific media; Enlightenment philosophy, especially Hume and Kant; German Idealism and phenomenology; Gothic literature; historiography; poetry and poetics.