Academic Staff

Dr Sarah Wootton

Contact Dr Sarah Wootton (email at s.e.wootton@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Dr Sarah Wootton joined the English Studies Department at Durham University in 2002. Her principal research and teaching interests are in the Romantic and Victorian periods with a particular focus on the afterlives of nineteenth-century writers in fiction, art, and screen adaptation.

Sarah's first book, Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature, was published by Palgrave-Macmillan, and she won the Keats-Shelley Memorial Prize for research on this topic. Her current research explores the cultural phenomenon of the Byronic hero, focusing, in particular, on the legacy of this figure in the fiction of nineteenth-century women writers (Austen, Eliot, Gaskell and the Brontës). The Rise of the Byronic Hero in Fiction and Film (under contract with Palgrave-Macmillan) also examines the ways in which screen adaptations of nineteenth-century novels have reinvented this popular figure.

Sarah welcomes PhD applications in the areas of nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts, and the cultural legacies of Romantic and Victorian writers.

She is a Co-Director of the Romantic Dialogues and Legacies Research Group at Durham University, and has co-organised the following public lecture series: ‘Romanticism and Its Legacies’ (2006); 'Modelling the Self: Subjectivity and Identity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Thought and Culture' (2007-2008); '"This Strange Dream upon the Water": Venice and the Cultural Imagination since 1800' (2009-2010); and 'The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns' (2012). Sarah has given public lectures at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, among others.

Research Groups

• Romantic and Pre-Romantic Studies
• Victorian Studies

Research Interests

• Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture
• Romantic Poetry
• Screen Adaptation
• Victorian Literature

Selected Publications

Books: authored

• Wootton, S. (2006). Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature.. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Books: edited

• O'Neill, M., Sandy, M. & Wootton, S. (2012). Venice and the Cultural Imagination: 'This Strange Dream upon the Water'. Pickering & Chatto.

Essays in edited volumes

• Wootton, S. (2013). Shelley, the Visual Arts, and Cinema. In The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. O'Neill, Michael. & Howe, Anthony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 561-576.
• Wootton, S. (2012). Henry James's Venice and the Visual Arts. In Venice and the Cultural Imagination. O'Neill, M., Sandy, M. & Wootton, S. Pickering & Chatto. 127-140.
• Wootton, S. (2012). Here then is a maze to begin, be in': Michael Ondaatje's Byronic inheritance. In Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century. Sandy, Mark. Aldershot: Ashgate. 163-174.
• Wootton, S. (2010). Close Reading Romanticism. In Teaching Romanticism. Higgins, David. & Ruston, Sharon. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. 134-145.
• Wootton, S. (2008). ''The wind blows cold out of the inner shrine of fear': Rossetti's Romantic Keats'. In Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era. Sandy, M. & Radford, A. Ashgate. 51-66.
• Wootton, S. (2007). ''Picturing in me a hero of romance': The Legacy of Jane Eyre's Byronic Hero'. In A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of 'Jane Eyre'.. Rubik, M. & Mettinger-Schartmann, E. Amsterdam New York: Rodopi. 229-241.
• Wootton, S. (2005). 'Keats’s Poetry as a Common Thread in English and American Pre-Raphaelitism.'. In Worldwide Pre-Raphaelitism.. Tobin, Thomas J. New York: State University of New York Press. 279-301.
• Wootton, S. (1999). Ghastly Visualities: Keats and Victorian Art. In The Influence and Anxiety of the British Romantics: Spectres of Romanticism. Ruston, S. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. 159-180.
• Wootton, S. (1999). Reinventing Keats: The Late Victorian Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Thomas Hall Caine. In Representing Victorian Lives. Hewitt, M. University of Leeds: Trinity and All Saints. 113-126.

Journal papers: academic

• Wootton, S. (2008). 'The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South'. Romanticism 14(1): 25-35.
• Wootton, S. (2007). 'The Byronic in Jane Austen's Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice.'. Modern Language Review 102(1): 26-39.
• Wootton, S. (2001). ‘Thomas Hardy, King Albert’s Book and Poems of War and Patriotism’. Thomas Hardy Journal 17(2): pp. 70-75.
• Wootton, S. (1999). William Maw Egley's 'The Lady of Shalott'. The Tennyson Research Bulletin (7): 132-140.

Journal papers: online

• Wootton, S (2008). "Into her Dream he Melted": Women Artists Remodelling Keats. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 51: 10pp.
• Sandy, M. & Wootton, S. (2008). Modelling the Self: Subjectivity and Identity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Thought and Culture. RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 51.

Other publications: research

• Wootton, S. (2004). 'Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood' and 'Samuel Palmer'. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. 846-847, 901-903.
• Wootton, S. (2004). The Nineteenth Century (Romantic Period): Poetry. Oxford University Press. The Year’s Work in English Studies 83(1): 580-593.
• Wootton, S. (2003). 'Lord Byron (Byronic Hero)'. ABC-Clio. 121-123.
• Wootton, S. (2003). The Nineteenth Century (Romantic Period): Poetry. The Year’s Work in English Studies 82: pp. 508-522.
• Wootton, S. (2002). 'Keats'.
• Wootton, S. (2001). 'Anne Brontë'.

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