Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)

Mark-FrostDr Mark Frost

Part-time Lecturer in English Literature

mark.frost@port.ac.uk

My research interests arise out of the works of John Ruskin, and have a particular emphasis on nineteenth-century scientific contexts and the interplay in Ruskin’s work of materiality, creativity, and culture.  I am current researching the contextualisation of Ruskin’s natural histories in relation to eighteenth century scientific models, nineteenth-century materialism (and especially the twin sciences of ecology and evolutionary theory), Evangelicalism, and Romanticism.  This will take the form of a monograph proposal, but has also yielded articles in Journal of Victorian Culture, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (both forthcoming) and Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies.   Recent archival research has led to a contracted monograph on  Ruskin’s Guild of St. George, due in December 2012, the first standard work on this subject for thirty years. I have also published on Ruskin, Turner, and postcolonialism in Journal of Commonwealth Literature; and I am undertaking a series of articles on the impact of Ruskin’s politics, to include a re-evaluation of the interplay between Ruskin’s politics and those of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; Pyotr Kropotkin’s response to Ruskin; and Ruskin’s influence on Sir Patrick Geddes.   I am currently planning a conference or symposium on Victorian Experiments.

I am a member of the editorial board of the online refereed journal, Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies (OScholars), and an annotations contributor to the Routledge ABES project. I was also involved in the Leverhulme-funded Electronic Edition of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters I at the Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University.

Recent publications 

Monograph 

  • The Lost Companion and John Ruskin’s Guild Idea (contracted to Anthem Press, December 2012). 

Journal Articles

  • '"A strange coincidence [...] between trees and communities of men": the Law of Help and the formation of societies in Modern Painters V', Nineteenth Century Prose, special Ruskin edition (Fall 2011)
  • 'The Everyday Marvels of Rust and Moss: John Ruskin and the ecology of the mundane', Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Spring 2011.
  • 'A Vital Truth: Ruskin, Science and Dynamic Materiality', Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture, 39.2 (2011).
  • '"The Guilty Ship": Ruskin, Turner, and Dabydeen', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45:3 (September 2010).
  • 'The Organic Impulse: Ruskin, trees, architecture, and society', The Eighth Lamp: Ruskin Studies (OScholars), June 2009.

Chapter in edited collection

  • ‘The Vitality of Helpful Nature’, in Ruskin and Vital Beauty [provisional title], ed. by Lars Spuybroek (Amsterdam: v2 Institute for the Unstable Media, 2011).