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Dr Penny Wilson

Contact Dr Penny Wilson (email at p.b.wilson@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Dr Wilson has broad research interests in the eighteenth century, and in particular on the literary reception of the classics and the history of classical scholarship and education in that period. After many years teaching and researching in Cambridge as Fellow and Lecturer in English at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) she came to Durham in September 2005 as Principal of Ustinov College, Durham’s only postgraduate-only College. Her publications include work on individual authors such as Pope, Swift and Defoe, and on feminist approaches to Augustan literature, and most recently a number of essays for The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English and the forthcoming Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. She is currently completing a major research project on English commentaries on classical poetry from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, drawing on interests in the history of the book and on the expanding range of classical literacies encouraged by the mediation of classical texts through the vernacular.

Research Groups

Department of English Studies

• Editing, Bibliography and History of the Book
• Romantic and Pre-Romantic Studies

Publications

Books: edited

• Wilson, P.B. (1990). Captain Singleton, by Daniel Defoe. World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Books: sections

• Wilson, P. (2005). 'Lyric, Pastoral, and Elegy.'. In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 3: 1660-1790.. Gillespie, Stuart. & Hopkins, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3: 1660-1790: 173-190.
• Wilson, P. (2005). 'Poetic Translators: An Overview.'. In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 3: 1660-1790.. Gillespie, Stuart. & Hopkins, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3: 1660-1790: 96-104.
• Gillespie, Stuart. & Wilson, P. (2005). 'The Publishing and Readership of Translation.'. In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 3: 1660-1790.. Gillespie, Stuart. & Hopkins, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3: 1660-1790: 38-51.
• Wilson, P. (2004). 'Homer and English Epic.'. In The Cambridge Companion to Homer.. Fowler, Robert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 272-286.

Edited works: contributions

• Wilson, P.B. (1989). "High Pindaricks upon stilts": a case-study in the eighteenth classical tradition. In Rediscovering Hellenism: the Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination. Clarke, G.W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 23-41.
• Wilson, P.B. (1988). Engendering the reader: "Wit and Poetry and Pope" once more. In The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays. Rousseau, G. S. & Rogers, Pat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 63-76.
• Wilson, P.B. (1982). Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth Century Reader. In Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Rivers, Isabel. Leicester: Leicester University Press. 69-96.

Journal papers: academic

• Wilson, P.B. (1986). Feminism and the Augustans. Critical Quarterly 28.