English

I have been at Keele since 1972, having read English at Pembroke College, Oxford, where I also completed a BLitt. In 1997 I was Fellow of the Centre for the Book at the British Library in London.

My main research interests are in eighteenth-century literature, especially Pope, Swift, and Johnson, and in the theory of textual criticism

I am textual adviser to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, which is due to appear in eighteen volumes between 2008 and 2015. The first volume, English Political Writings, 1711-1714, appeared in 2008; A Tale of a Tub in July 2010, and Gulliver’s Travels will be published in 2011

In 2004 David Womersley and I were given a grant of ££533,661 for five years from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to help with the textual editing of the Cambridge volumes and to compile an archive of variant Swift texts to complement the print edition. The archive is now available, containing texts and critical introduction.

I am in the late stages of planning a collection of essays with Paddy Bullard (University of Kent) on Swift and the Nature of the Book, and I am exploring the possibility of writing a short introduction, How to Read an Eighteenth-Century Book, for CUP.

• ‘Swift and the Art of Political Publication: Hints and Title Pages, 1711-1714’, in Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 116-139.
• Short signed introductions to 300 texts in Jonathan Swift Archive (2010)
• [with Nicolas Barker], ‘David Fairweather Foxon, 1923-2001’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 161 (2009), 159-75.
• ‘The Concept of Authorial Intention in Textual Criticism’, in Anglo-American Scholarly Editing, 1980-2005, Ecdotica, 6 (2009), 57-75 [reprint of an article first published in 1984].
• [With Linda Bree], ‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and the Future of the Scholarly Edition’, in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, ed. M. Deegan and K. Sutherland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 127-36.
• ‘The Failure of the Swift-Pope Miscellanies (1727-32) and The Life and Genuine Character of Doctor Swift (1733)’, in Reading Swift: Papers from The Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, ed. H. J. Real (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2008), pp. 131-48.
• ‘Naming and Shaming in the Poetry of Pope and Swift’, in Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth-Century British Satire and its Legacy, ed. N. Hudson and A. Santesso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 160-75.
• ‘Pope and the Book Trade’, in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 186-97.