Maria Albano
Biography
I was born and raised in Milan, Italy. I read for a BA in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University, and before starting my Mst in English literature (1830-1914) at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford I took a break from academia writing opinion pieces and literary essays for various publications, including The New Statesman, The Telegraph, Literary Review, LitHub, The Independent and The Spectator.
Operating at the intersection of narrative theory and poetics, my PhD research explores how rhyme shapes story in narrative poems of the long nineteenth century. Informed by contemporaneous debates on rhyme, narrative, and the historiography of stanza forms, my investigation into the status of rhyme in narrative unfolds through close readings of verse by authors such as Lord Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and EBB.
Research Interests
Pope; Milton; Keats; Wordsworth; Browning; Tennyson; C. Rossetti; EBB; historicist poetics; style, rhythm and sound; pre-Raphaelitism in literature and the arts; Romantic and post-romantic poetry; melodrama in fiction; classical reception; philosophy, theology and literature; narrative theory; comparative literature.
Connect with Maria
Publications
Sycamore Trees. The Cambridge Review of Books. (Short story)
Helen DeWitt’s brilliance and unsuccess. The Spectator World.
Language is the New Protagonist of My Brilliant Friend’s Third Season. LitHub.
Woolf: Heart or Brain? The Critic.
On the value of directionless imagination. Substack.
Science and its discontents. Substack.
Writing outside the box. The Critic.
Truman Capote’s Ode to the Unlovables. Substack.
Will the real Elena Ferrante please sit down? The Critic.
The Leopard is beautifully complicated. Prospect.
War Stories. Literary Review.
Ocean Vuong’s newest work is an affecting celebration of misfits. The Spectator World.
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed. The Spectator.
Lord Byron's Sex Education. The New Statesman.
Patrick Ryan's Second Novel Doesn't Pretend to Be Perfect. The Spectator World.
Being a bookseller isn't what it was. The Spectator.
Poetry in Pilgrimage: In Conversation with Camille Ralphs. The Camera.
An overcrowded museum is a sin against art. The Telegraph.
George Saunders's thoroughly Dickensian novella. The Spectator.
‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed. The Spectator.
'A modern masterpiece from a British titan': John of John by Douglas Stuart, reviewed. The Telegraph.
'Each man is an island': The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed. Airmail.
A World Without People. On Will Self's The Quantity Theory of Morality. The Metropolitan Review.