Centre for Studies in Literature (CSL)
Dr Páraic Finnerty
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
paraic.finnerty@port.ac.uk
My central research interests are American literature and transatlantic literary relations. My first book, Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare (2006), examines Shakespeare’s reception in nineteenth-century America and locates Dickinson’s allusions to his writings in this context. My second book, Dickinson and her British Contemporaries, will explore connections between Dickinson’s writings and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, the Brontës, and George Eliot. In 2012, I was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship to facilitate the completion of this project. I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Emily Dickinson International Society and serve on the Editorial Board of the Emily Dickinson Journal. I am also involved in CSL’s Victorian Literary Heritage project.
Publications
Books
Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. 2014.
(co-authored with C. Boyce and A. Millim) Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. 2013.
Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2006.
Journal Special Issues
(co-edited with B. Price) Communities and Companionship Early Modern Literary Studies (forthcoming 2013)
(co-edited with P. Pulham) Decadent Crossings Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 16.2 (October 2012).
(co-edited with B. Price) Amity in Early Modern Literature and Culture Literature and History 20.1 (Spring 2011).
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
‘Decadent Masculinity in Early James.’ Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 16.2 (October 2012), 147-63
“‘Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson in Ticknor and Fields -’: A Transatlantic Encounter with Britain’s Poet Laureate” Emily Dickinson Journal 20.1 (Spring 2011), 56-77.
“’Both are alike; and both alike we like’: Sovereignty and Amity in Shakespeare’s King John.” Literature and History 20.1 (Spring 2011), 38-58.
"The Englishman in America: Masculinity in Love and Death on Long Island and Father of Frankenstein." Genders 51 (Spring 2010).
“Rival Italies: Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin and Henry James.” Prose Studies 31.2 (2009):109-121.
“Queer Appropriation: Shakespeare’s sonnets and Dickinson’s love poems.” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.2 (2008).
“A Dickinson Reverie: The Worm, the Snake, Marvel, and Nineteenth-Century Dreaming.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 16. 2 (2007): 94-118.
“The Body of the Terrorist in Contemporary Cinema.” Reconstruction: A Journal in Contemporary Culture 7.2 (2007). (co-authored with Robert Duggan).
“The Daisy and the Dandy: Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde.” Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 9.1 (2005): 63-87.
“‘We think of others possessing you with the throes of Othello’: Dickinson playing Othello, race and Tommaso Salvini.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 11.1 (2002): 81-90.
“Reading Transformations: Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare.” Studies in English and Comparative Literature 12 (1999): 227-39.
“‘No Matter Now Sweet - But When I am Earl’: Dickinson’s Shakespearean Cross-Dressing.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 7.2 (1998): 65-94.
Book Chapters
‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Transatlantic Women Writers’ in Emily Dickinson in Context. Ed. Eliza Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.
“Killer Boys: Male Friendship and Criminality in The Butcher Boy, Elephant and Boy A.” Crime Cultures: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film. Eds. B. Nicol, P. Pulham and E. McNulty. London: Continuum Books 2010 141-154.
Current Research Project
"Dickinson and her British Contemporaries”. This book-length project examines connections between Dickinson’s writings and the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Brontës, and George Eliot.
Grants Received
AHRC Early Career Fellowship (£28, 500) 2012
Copeland Fellowship, Amherst College, Massachusetts, Spring Semester 2004
The Emily Dickinson International Society's Scholar in Amherst Award 2001
The Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities' Colyer-Fergusson award 1998
The School of English Research Studentships 1996-9