Dr Jonathon Shears

Title: Lecture in English
Phone: (+44) 01782 733014
Email:
Location: CBB 0.053
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Contacting me:

I am a Lecturer in English (1750-1850) and editor of The Byron Journal. I studied at Oxford and Liverpool and held posts at Chester and Aberystwyth before arriving at Keele in 2009. I research and work in three main areas: Romanticism, material culture in the nineteenth century and the representation of alcohol in literature and culture. I am researching and writing a monograph titled The Hangover: A Cultural History, 1600–2000 (forthcoming with Liverpool University Press) and am co-editing a sourcebook of contemporary accounts of The Great Exhibition of 1851. I would be very interested in hearing from you if you are looking to research in any of my areas of specialism, particularly Byron. For information and queries about submissions to The Byron Journal please follow this link. 

Selected Publications

  • Shears J and Harrison J. 2013. ‘The Ideas in Thing Town: Villette, Art and Moveable Objects’. In Literary bric-a-brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities. Shears and Sattaur (Eds.). Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Shears J. 2013. Digesting Don Juan Cantos I and II. In Aspects of Don Juan. Cochran P (Ed.). Cambridge Scholars.
  • Shears J. 2013. Listening to Christabel: Sound, Silence and the Contingencies of Voice. Romanticism, vol. 1(19), 44-56. doi>
  • Shears J. Harrison J (Ed.). 2013. Literary bric-a-brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities. Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Shears J. 2012. ‘“D----d Corkscrew Staircases”: Byron’s Hangovers’. The Byron Journal, vol. 40(1). doi>

Full Publications List show

Books

  • Shears J. Harrison J (Ed.). 2013. Literary bric-a-brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities. Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Shears J. Shears J and Rawes A (Eds.). 2010. Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Shears J. 2009. The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading Against the Grain. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Journal Articles

  • Shears J. 2013. Listening to Christabel: Sound, Silence and the Contingencies of Voice. Romanticism, vol. 1(19), 44-56. doi>
  • Shears J. 2012. ‘“D----d Corkscrew Staircases”: Byron’s Hangovers’. The Byron Journal, vol. 40(1). doi>
  • Shears J. 2008. Byron's Aposiopesis. Romanticism, vol. 14(2), 183-195. doi>
  • Shears J. 2006. ‘A tale untold: The Search for a Story in Byron’s Lara’. The Byron Journal, vol. 34(1).

Chapters

  • Shears J and Harrison J. 2013. ‘The Ideas in Thing Town: Villette, Art and Moveable Objects’. In Literary bric-a-brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities. Shears and Sattaur (Eds.). Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Shears J. 2013. Digesting Don Juan Cantos I and II. In Aspects of Don Juan. Cochran P (Ed.). Cambridge Scholars.
  • Shears J. 2012. ‘“Why should I hide my regard?”: Erotic Austen’. In Sex, Society and Television. Johnson, Glynn, Aston (Eds.). Continuum.
  • Shears J. 2010. ‘Continuity in the Self: Wordsworth, Byron, Bloom’. In Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom. Shears and Rawes (Eds.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
  • Shears J. 2008. ‘“The truth is in abeyance”: Byron the coquettish narrator’. In Refiguring the Coquette. King and Schlick (Eds.). Bucknell University Press.
  • Shears J. 2008. ‘Aesthetic Dialectic in Sardanapalus’. In Byron: Liberty and Poetic Licence. Beatty, Howe, Robinson (Eds.). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
  • Shears J. 2008. ‘Byron and Wordsworth: Satan’s Neoclassical and Romantic Heirs’. In Byron: Heritage and Legacy. Wilson (Ed.). Palgrave.
  • Shears J. 2006. '"Approaching the Unapproached Light": Milton and the Romantic Visionary’. In Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens. Hopps G and Stabler J (Eds.). Aldersot: Ashgate.

At present I teach on the modules Reading Literature, Poetry through Practice, Gothic Fictions and Romanticisms. I would welcome PhD students with interests in nineteenth-century literature and culture, particularly the writing of Coleridge and Byron.