Dr Uttara Natarajan

My first monograph, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (OUP, 1998), was on the critic and essayist, William Hazlitt (1778-1830). Engaging the range of Hazlitt’s writings, including art and literary criticism, political journalism, and conversational essays, my monograph uncovered the shared philosophical basis of his aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Subsequent publications on Hazlitt have focused on his Shakespeare criticism, and on his influence on the younger generation of Romantic writers, such as Keats and Shelley. My survey of Romantic-era scholarship, The Romantic Poets (Blackwell, 2007), was published in the Blackwell Guides to Criticism series. In the last decade, my research has extended into the Victorian era. I have published extensively on the non-fiction prose of the era, by writers such as Ruskin, Pater, and Dickens, attending especially to the way in which its debts to, and divergences from, certain key Romantic forebears have shaped its characteristic ethical emphases. I am developing this research into a monograph that tracks the ‘familiar style’ of the Romantic essayists to the realist practice of their Victorian successors, showing as it does so the centrality of the Romantic essay to the evolution of nineteenth-century realism. Outside of the mainstream of my research, I have published a scholarly edition, Plain Speaking (Permanent Black, 2007), of the memoirs and lectures of A.N. Sattanathan (1905-1990), architect of India’s first affirmative action policy, towards the lower castes in the state of Tamil Nadu. Current doctoral supervision includes research on Charlotte Brontë’s fiction and two AHRC-funded projects, one on the poet Edward Fitzgerald, and the other on the figure of the sibyl in nineteenth-century literature and culture. I welcome research supervision across the Romantic and Victorian eras.