- Department of English
University of Groningen
Postbus 176
9700 AS Groningen
The Netherlands
Richard Lansdown
University of Groningen, English, Faculty Member
- Lord Byron, Romanticism, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, Pacific Island Studies, John Ruskin, and 11 moreLiterary Criticism, F.R. Leavis, Bronislav Malinowski, Sylvia Plath, James Kelman, Literary Darwinism Or Evolutionary Literary Theory, Russian Literature, English Literature, English, Humanities, and History of Ideasedit
Berlioz' Mémoires (1870) and Delacroix's Journal (1893) are commonly seen as two of the greatest records of Romantic creativity. They also share a common background in French Romanticism, and are powerful instances of two great forms of... more
Berlioz' Mémoires (1870) and Delacroix's Journal (1893) are commonly seen as two of the greatest records of Romantic creativity. They also share a common background in French Romanticism, and are powerful instances of two great forms of autobiographical writing. This essay takes these features into account, but also contrasts the two Romantic artists — and human individuals — recorded in these books.
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This article examines the contentious conclusion to Ibsen's late drama, Lille Eyolf (Little Eyolf) in terms of Ibsen's deep mistrust of humanist and idealist ethics. In the wake of their son's death and their shared guilt, the hero and... more
This article examines the contentious conclusion to Ibsen's late drama, Lille Eyolf (Little Eyolf) in terms of Ibsen's deep mistrust of humanist and idealist ethics. In the wake of their son's death and their shared guilt, the hero and heroine abruptly but bleakly commit themselves to a life of philanthropic altruism: a project that we cannot regard without scepticism. But when humanist idealism has consumed every other moral crutch in modern people like the Allmers, where else can they – or indeed we – turn?
Research Interests: Ibsen and Henrik Ibsen
A study of D. H. Lawrence's brief visit to Kandy, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in 1922, and his only significant work from the period, the poem 'Elephant'.
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This essay seeks to make and substantiate a bold claim: that Not Not While the Giro, published in 1983, is the most distinguished set of short stories issued in the United Kingdom since World War Two. Furthermore, even if other... more
This essay seeks to make and substantiate a bold claim: that Not Not While the Giro, published in 1983, is the most distinguished set of short stories issued in the United Kingdom since World War Two. Furthermore, even if other collections — by Sylvia Townshend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, John Fowles, V. S. Pritchett, Alan Sillitoe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angela Carter, for example — were felt to be of greater artistic merit, Kelman’s should still be regarded as the most important, capturing as it does with an urgency worthy of its subject the decline of working-class male culture in the ‘post-industrial’ Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This discussion sees the collection in very general evaluative terms, therefore. In particular, before it turns to Kelman’s stories in detail, it needs to establish the political and aesthetic background to their success, and to explore how the political and the aesthetic ultimately found their places and proportions in his achievement.
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A discussion of vision in the first instalment of Byron's poem: the point of view of a classically educated Englishman travelling amongst uneducated European locals.
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A discussion of the role of Malinowski's infamous diary on his intellectual progress in the Trobriand Islands during WW1.
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An account of Montgomery's mini-epic of 1828 in terms of its fascination with coral islands and its imaginative anticipation of evolutionary theory.
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A polemic about literature in schools and the Australian public imaginary
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A discussion of the almost countless roads in Thomas Hardy's fiction, as objects both 'natural' and 'cultural'.
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A discussion of Disraeli in Byron's footsteps in the Mediterranean, and the impact of these tours on both men's sense of vocation.
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A discussion of Romantic themes in the insular Pacific, particularly relating to the Anson and HMS Bounty voyages, Wordsworth and Byron
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An account of the influence of Romanticism on Australian literature in the nineteenth century.
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A discussion of Byron's role in nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture.
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A discussion of Austen's novel in terms of family relations, rites of passage, and the Gothic.
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A discussion of mental patterns, specifically relating to figures in loco parentis, in the 1799 'Prelude'
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A discussion of the Byronic hero trope as visible in heroines of Victorian Fiction, particularly in Dickens and George Eliot
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A study of the chapter on Galapagos from the Beagle voyage, concentrating on Darwin's habits of investigation and his qualities of blindness and insight.
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A discussion of the relation between Byron's comic epic and nineteenth-century British fiction
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A discussion of varieties of 'maturity' in Leavis and Nussbaum
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A study of Byron's 'pagan attitudes', especially in Don Juan: stoical, materialistic, and relativistic.
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A study of Wordsworth's paradoxical attitude to publication: an act of enshrinement and death.
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A discussion of the creative origins of Shelley's novel, and her guilty presumption at writing it.
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An interview with the South African novelist (1929-2014), particularly on his literary-critical interests.
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In “A New Scene of Thought”: Studies in Romantic Realism Richard Lansdown contributes to the history and interpretation of English literature, of the literature of the Romantic period, and of the relation of Romanticism to the eighteenth... more
In “A New Scene of Thought”: Studies in Romantic Realism Richard Lansdown contributes to the history and interpretation of English literature, of the literature of the Romantic period, and of the relation of Romanticism to the eighteenth century. The study is also a contribution to the history of ideas in so far as it re-examines the context of English Romantic literature in the light of a profound shift in attitude that announces itself in a new form of literary realism, not confined to the empirical representation of objects but extending into moral philosophy, loosely defined. The eighteenth century is often associated with the birth of novelistic realism; and the Romantic movement is often associated with intellectual idealism. This study asks its readers to reconsider and perhaps even to invert attitudes like these.
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The first such selection since Leslie Marchand's in 1982, and drawn from his canonical and un-bowdlerized edition. Uniquely, the letters are drawn into chapters with biographical headnotes, so supplying an informal autobiography on the... more
The first such selection since Leslie Marchand's in 1982, and drawn from his canonical and un-bowdlerized edition. Uniquely, the letters are drawn into chapters with biographical headnotes, so supplying an informal autobiography on the poet's part.
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An introduction to Byron's work for the undergraduate and general reader: biography, context, and survey of major works, including letters and journals.
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A critical anthology of Western writing about the insular Pacific, from the Renaissance to contemporary literature.
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A monograph about the debatable claims made on imaginative literature by various schools of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and historicism.
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An edition of James' novel with a full introduction and an important discussion of the major textual issue: its division into parts in various early editions.
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A discussion of Byron's neoclassical plays: Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari, based on a PhD thesis at University College London, 1989