Dr Matthew Scott

Biography

Dr. Matthew Scott is currently working as a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading , United Kingdom. Responsibilities Within the department I convene modules in: William Hazlitt and Revolutionary Romanticism Lord Byron: Poetry, Life, Reputation Nation and Empire (MA module) I have also contributed to courses in: Restoration to Romanticism; Romantics to Decadents; Nineteenth-century novel Shakespeare; Critical Theory; Languages of Literature; Revisioning Shakespeare Literature and Science (MA module) Areas of Interest My research falls broadly within the field of British and American Romanticism but my teaching stretches over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The writers in whom I have an especial interest are Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Scott in Britain, and Emerson, Melville, and the James brothers in America but my approach to them has tended to be cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary with a strong focus upon the study of the history of aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy. The kinds of concepts within the history of ideas that appeal to me relate to theories of literary influence, artistic representation, emotion and sympathy, orientalism and imperialism, and I am particularly interested in investigating the language or rhetoric that attends to these. Most especially, at present, I am concerned with ideas of wonder, novelty and the ordinary, and the importance that has been attached to these by writers who have argued for and against the ethical value of literary study.  

Research Interest

My research falls broadly within the field of British and American Romanticism but my teaching stretches over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.