Professor Robin Jarvis

• Qualifications:BA (Hons) English, PhD
• Position:Professor of English Literature
• Department:ACE - Creative and Cultural Industries
• Telephone:+4411732 84459
• Email:Robin.Jarvis@uwe.ac.uk

About me

I taught at UWE from 1988 to 2018, during which time my research interests spread from Romantic poetry and literary theory to travel literature and book history.  I returned every so often to the poetry of Wordsworth, which was the subject of my doctoral thesis and my first book, but broadened my view to other writers and genres of the period, including the literature of travel and exploration and its continuities with modern travel writing.  I have always been fascinated by material aspects of the production of literature, including problems of authorial revision and the existence of different versions of texts, along with general issues of editorial theory.  Latterly I became particularly concerned with the history of reading, and brought this together with my other interests in my most recent book, Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel (Ashgate, 2012). As the title indicates, this is a study of the reception of travel books about North America in the Romantic period. While it attends fully to the opinions of professional reviewers, it is unique in its efforts to recover the reading experiences of private individuals.

In August 2018 I retired from UWE and was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus. I am currently working on projects focused on British Romanticism's links with Bristol and the South West. I have led the development of a free online course called Writing the West (​https://www.udemy.com/writing-the-west/) on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers linked with Bristol, Bath, and the West Country. The course ran for the first time in June-July 2018 and remains available online.

Area of expertise

Romantic literature                                                         Travel writing

Publications

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