Prof. Ross Wilson
Biography
I was born in Salford and brought up in Manchester, where I attended Philips High School and Bury College. I was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and University College London before completing my doctorate at Cambridge in 2004. I held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel (2004-7) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of English, Cambridge (2007-9) before being appointed to a Lectureship in Literature at the University of East Anglia in 2009. I returned to Cambridge in 2013 as Lecturer in Criticism in the Faculty of English. I am now Professor of the History and Theory of Criticism and a Fellow of Emmanuel College.
I work chiefly on the history, theory, and practice of literary criticism and on poetry in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My latest monograph is Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and my edited collection Percy Shelley in Context was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. My writing has appeared in ELH, New Literary History, Romanticism, European Romantic Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other venues. I have been on BBC 4 talking about Alexander Pope and the Thames, on BBC Radio 4 talking about Lord Byron as a student, and on ABC's Late Night Live discussing the apparent demise of the book blurb.
I serve on the editorial board of Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and I am chairing the panel of judges for the British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize 2026.
Current projects include a special issue of The Cambridge Quarterly on close reading (co-edited with Stefan Uhlig of the University of California, Davis) and The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 7 (Romanticism), which I am editing for Oxford University Press; I also list a handful of forthcoming articles and chapters below.
Click on this link for my full CV and on this link for a list of my reviews and occasional writing.
Research Interests
The history, theory, and practice of literary criticism, especially from the eighteenth century to today; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in English; Romanticism; literature, politics, and ethics; literature and theology; textual editing and criticism.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
I welcome enquiries concerning postgraduate supervision in the areas suggested by 'Research Interests' above.
Connect with Ross
Publications
Books
Critical Forms: Forms of Literary Criticism, 1750–2020 (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013; pbk 2016)
Theodor Adorno (Routledge, 2007)
Chinese (Mandarin) translation: Chongqing University Press, 2016
Turkish translation: FOL, 2023
Subjective Universality in Kant’s Aesthetics (Peter Lang, 2007)
Edited Collections
Percy Shelley in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (Routledge, 2009; pbk 2011)
Articles and Chapters
'What is a Posthumous Poem?', in Percy Shelley in Collaboration, ed. by Merrilees Roberts and others (London: Legenda, forthcoming)
'Contemporary Reviews and Nineteenth-Century Reception', in William Hazlitt in Context, ed. by Ian Balfour and Charles Mahoney (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
'Criticism and Judgement', in Benjamin and Literary Studies, ed. by Louis Klee (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
‘Odtujitev in tuje: Adorno v fermentu dialektike’ [Slovenian translation of ‘Alienation and the Alien: Adorno in the Ferment of Dialectics’], Problemi, 1–2 (2025), 83–94
Preface and ‘English Literature to 1792’, in Percy Shelley in Context, ed. by Ross Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 2025), pp. xix–xxiii and 67–73
‘Clare and the Sublime’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Clare, ed. by Sarah Houghton-Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 60–74
‘“The Most Vivid Poetry”: The Bible and/as Poetry in Shelley and Byron’ and ‘Passages and Commentary: Shelley and Byron’, in The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, ed. by Stephen Prickett with Elisabeth Jay, 5 vols (London: T&T Clark, 2024), IV: Enlightenment to Romanticism, pp. 359–412
‘More than Justice: Balance and Persuasion in Hazlitt’, in Persuasion after Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism, ed. by Yasmin Solomonescu and Stefan H. Uhlig (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 86–102
‘Shelley in the Overgrowth’, in Shelley for Our Times, ed. by Kate Singer and Omar F. Miranda (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 195–213
‘The Postscript’, in Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies, ed. by Charles Martindale and others (Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 104–17
‘Hear Here: A Homophone in English Poetry’, English Literary History, 90 (2023), 549–75
Preface to YaÅŸamın DiyalektiÄŸi: Adorno’yu Anlamak [Dialectic of Life: Understanding Adorno] (FOL, 2023), Turkish translation of Theodor Adorno (see above under ‘Books’)
Afterword to special issue: ‘Reading Shelley on the Bicentenary of his Death’, ed. by Will Bowers and Mathelinda Nabugodi, European Romantic Review, 33 (2022), 753–57
‘Strange Designs: Byron, Shelley, and Ottava Rima’, in Byron Among the English Poets, ed. by Claire Bucknell and Matthew Ward (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 172–86
‘“We Manufacture Fun”: Capital and the Production of Affect’, in Affect and Literature, ed. by Alex Houen (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 100–115
‘The Hidden Seeds of Survival’, New Literary History, 49 (2018), 149–63
‘Shelley’s Plato’, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Philosophy, ed. by Philip Wilson and Piers Rawling (Routledge, 2018), pp.345–57
‘Ruskin/Browning, Alpenstock/Hatchet’, in The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830–1930: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. by Marcus Waithe and Claire White (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp.81–96
‘Henry James at Any Rate’, Henry James Review, 38 (2017), 250–59
‘Hegel and the Matter of Poetry’, Textual Practice, 31 (2017), 1237–52
‘Reading Habits’, Thinking Verse, 4:2 (2015) http://www.thinkingverse.com/issue04b.html
‘Browning’s Balancing Acts’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry, ed. by Matthew Bevis (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 337–50
‘The Beautiful and the Sublime’, in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. by George Pattison, Graham Ward, and Nick Adams (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 419–34
‘Clare’s Indistinct Array’, Romanticism, 17 (2011), 148–59
‘New Critical Theory’, in Michael Ryan (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Blackwell Reference Online. http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/book?id=g9781405183123_9781405183123
‘Shelley’s Sounds of Air’, Thinking Verse, 1 (2010), http://www.thinkingverse.com
‘Introduction’, in The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (see above under ‘Books’), pp. 1–12
‘Poetry as Reanimation in Shelley’, in The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics (see above under ‘Books’), pp. 125–145
‘Voluptuousness and Asceticism in Adorno’, in ‘Writing Pleasure Now’, special issue of German Life and Letters, ed. by Lucia Ruprecht and Michael Minden, 62 (2009), 270–83
‘Robert Browning’s Compounds’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 524–31
‘Dialectical Aesthetics and the Kantian Rettung: On Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory’, New German Critique, 104 (2008), 55–69
‘Coleridge’s German “Absolutism”’, in Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. by James Vigus and Jane Wright (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 171–87
‘Aesthetics’, in Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. by Deborah Cook (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 147–60
‘Coleridge and the Life of Language’, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 27 (2006), 38–44