Books and Edited Works by Steve Van-Hagen
Romanticism 24.2 Special Issue: Edgy Romanticism , 2018
Articles and Chapters by Steve Van-Hagen
Humanities, 2024
This essay argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Chuck Palahniuk's self-descri... more This essay argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Chuck Palahniuk's self-described "Horror Trilogy" of novels, Lullaby, Diary and Haunted, is their representation of obsessions, compulsions, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders. The essay analyses these representations from a variety of different perspectives, including medical and psychiatric approaches, clinical and self-help narratives, and biocultural readings emanating from cultural history and Critical Disability Studies. It is demonstrated that the novels reflect a range of the debates that arise from these competing approaches, and the points of similarity and difference in the readings produced are identified. Palahniuk's representations, it is suggested, must be seen in the contexts of a number of his recurrent thematic preoccupations, and of his engagement with existential comedy. Ultimately, the essay suggests that Palahniuk's representations of obsessions, compulsions and OCD must be seen as multi-faceted and protean, as befitting the awareness of the complicated current debates about their conceptualisation that the novels display.
Negotiating Feminism and Faith in the Lives and Works of Late Medieval and Early Modern Women, edited by Holly Faith Nelson and Adrea Johnson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), pp.255-77, 2024
Literary Encyclopedia, 2022
The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies , 2021
This article argues that insufficient attention has been paid within existing accounts of the car... more This article argues that insufficient attention has been paid within existing accounts of the career of the ‘Poetical Shoemaker’ James Woodhouse (1735-1820) to items in the newspaper and periodical press about and by him, with specific reference to the years of his greatest fame, c.1763-7. To remedy this, the article focuses most, within a wider account, upon the publication of each of ‘The Advertisement’ to Woodhouse’s first volume in 1764; an anonymous letter two days later, probably by Woodhouse himself; and two poems addressed to Woodhouse by labouring-class admirers which provide insight into his reception by the labouring classes.
The Literary Encyclopedia , 2020
A History of British Working-Class Literature, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, 2017
Jonathan Swift and Philosophy, edited by Janelle Poetzsch, 2016
Social Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century: Clubs, Literary Salons and Textual Coteries, edited by Ileana Baird , 2014
While the eighteenth-century has been seen for critical generations as a period of great sociabil... more While the eighteenth-century has been seen for critical generations as a period of great sociability -an age of clubs, coffee-houses and salons, of The Scriblerians, The Kit-Kat
The Blackcountryman , 2007
Recording another local landmark of his youth, he also provides an extremely unusual description ... more Recording another local landmark of his youth, he also provides an extremely unusual description of an eighteenth-century lightening conductor: Old Swinford near erects its pointed spire, From feverish skies to drain the fluid fire; When thro' dark ether dread deliriums rave, Each neighb'ring dome's endanger'd roof to save; To draw each charge from heav'n-built batteries, loud, And spike the ordnance of each hostile cloud. (I: 782-87) Woodhouse's passage headed "Birmingham and Wolverhampton" begins by leading the reader through "bustling Birmingham … / Its multiplying streets and villas bright", through "Barr-beacon's barren heights", "Wednesbury's and Walsall's blazing spires", and through "Wolverhampton's turrets", reminding us that "all the variegated Views" are "confin'd / By distant Derby's blue-capp'd peaks behind." It is then that some of his most concentrated depictions of Midlands industry emerge. Poems describing and recording industrialisation
The Blackcountryman , 2007
In the past two decades there has been a dramatic expansion of the canon of eighteenth-century Br... more In the past two decades there has been a dramatic expansion of the canon of eighteenth-century British verse as critics and scholars have recuperated the women and labouring-class poets previously lost to the sands of literary history. One of the major beneficiaries of this renaissance of the marginalised voices of the past has been the Rowley Regis-born poet James Woodhouse (1735-1820). Apart from papers at academic conferences and articles published in scholarly journals, Woodhouse's works have been included in several anthologies. The interested reader can find brief selections from Woodhouse's mammoth verse autobiography "The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus" in Roger Lonsdale's influential "The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse" (1984), but much greater space is given over to him in the second volume of the pioneering "Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets" anthology (ed. by Bridget Keegan, 2003), where the generous selection of his works (see pp.141-234) fills approximately a third of the whole volume. "The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection" (2005), meanwhile, makes available extended selections from what is surely Woodhouse's most significant (yet least known) work. Woodhouse was born into a family who had worked a farm in Rowley for some three hundred years. Taught to read and write at school, his formal education nonetheless ended at the age of just eight. Growing to six feet six inches, he began his working life as a shoemaker and married Hannah Fletcher (the 'Daphne' of his poems) in January 1760. His occupation seems significant, as a high proportion of labouring-class poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were shoemakers, perhaps because of the practical opportunities for composing verse the occupation offered. In 1759, Woodhouse addressed an elegy to William Shenstone, influential pastoral poet, essayist, landscape gardener. Shenstone was also the owner of The Leasowes estate near Halesowen, two miles from Rowley Regis where Woodhouse was still working. Both Shenstone and his publisher, Robert Dodsley, were impressed, and in 1762 published the poem. Shenstone effectively began acting as a patron to Woodhouse, and although the former died a year later, Dodsley and his brother took over a subscription for Woodhouse's poems. It was published as "Poems on Sundry Occasions" in 1764. It features only one poem not addressed to a patrona far cry from the lacerating satire Woodhouse later directed at Elizabeth Montagu in "The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus". The project 'enjoyed' some mixed reviews, but sold well. In 1766 new patrons (George, first Baron Lyttleton, and the Montagus) ensured that a second edition appeared as "Poems on Several Occasions". This edition contains lists of "Benefactors" and subscribers, both including an impressive number of dignitaries.
Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts , 2005
This article advances the case, on the tri-centenary of his birth, and a year before the 250th an... more This article advances the case, on the tri-centenary of his birth, and a year before the 250th anniversary of his death, for a formalist re-reading of Stephen Duck’s best-known poem *The Thresher’s Labour* (1730; 1736), employing aspects of close reading and stylistics seldom previously used to analyse the poem. The article argues for the view that the poem attempts to reconcile the literary materials available to Duck through existing literary precedents with a mimetic evocation of the apparent experience of threshing. This results, it is suggested, in a poetic medium which produces something generically distinct from the pre-existing poetic precedents for writing about rural labour, including both pastoral and georgic. Duck therefore confers the status of art upon his depiction of apparently-lived experience, engaging in the process that the anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake terms ‘making special’.
James Woodhouse, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (Selections) , 2005
Connections: The Literary Scene in the South, 2005
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Books and Edited Works by Steve Van-Hagen
Articles and Chapters by Steve Van-Hagen