糖心TV

Faculty of Arts colleagues and students are warmly invited to come along to the next Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies research seminar. The research seminar will take place in the Student Hub (FAB5.49). Drinks and nibbles are provided.

Tuesday 21 October, 5pm, FAB5.49:

鈥淧oetry Undead: Dracula, Romanticism, and the Revamping of Genre鈥�

Peter Miller (University of Mississippi)

Scholarship on Dracula has tended to emphasize the novel鈥檚 late Victorian and proto modernist commitments, perhaps best encapsulated by the modern media technologies (e.g. typewriters, phonographs) that the vampire hunters use to track down and defeat the Count. This talk instead turns the novel backward towards Romanticism, by unpacking its largely overlooked series of allusions to popular, ballad-inflected poems by Scott, Coleridge, Hemans, and most significantly, Byron. Beyond offering compelling intertexts at significant narrative moments, these allusions, Miller will argue, allow Stoker to grip the minds and bodies of his characters, and readers, in a way that only metered poetry can.

Peter Miller is Ottilie Schillig Chair and Assistant Professor of English at The University of Mississippi. He is a scholar of English-language poetry from Romanticism to the present, with particular interests in sound and rhythm, music, and media studies. His first book, Poetry, Sound, and the Matter of Prosody, 1800-2000 (Oxford, 2025), makes the case for conceiving prosodic analysis as a form of media theory. He is currently working on a book project considering the role poetry has played in the modern novel, from Bram Stoker鈥檚 Dracula to Zadie Smith鈥檚 On Beauty.

Best wishes,

Dr Steve Purcell

Director of Research, English and Comparative Literary Studies