Book Projects
British Women’s Poetry and the Psychology of Aesthetics, 1770-1850, 2 vols (Forthcoming Newcastle: CSP, 2016). Volume I: Melancholy and Mirth, 1770-1824. / Volume II: Silence and Serenity, 1825-1850.
This project challenges previous and current psycho-aesthetic categorizations in comparative and Romantic studies within HE English subject. While it is conventionally assumed that women writers’ versified narratives do not quite fit into what is known by literary critics as “Romantic aesthetics,” the significance of their engagement with early psychology of aesthetics is outstanding, yet fairly overlooked. These two volumes advance comparative studies of female-authored narrative verse from 1770 to 1850, addressing two particular psycho-literary areas: emotions and aestheticism. Volume I expands on the emotionality of verse narratives during early C19th, discussing contradictory topics such as “melancholy” and “mirth” by reading the restoration of mythological tropes into the Romantic period. Volume II introduces the poetic form of stoic practices of silence, by reading Dionysian and Apollonian aesthetic dichotomies in Romantic women’s poetry in later stages of the Romantic age.
Painful Moods: A Psycho-Literary Encounter of Renaissance Minds and Contemporary Narratives, eds. Nick Davis, Maryam Farahani, Ian Schermbrucker, & Andrej Stancak (Texts and Embodiments in Perspective Series. Newcastle: CSP, 2015-2016).
This edited volume is drawn from proceedings of three conferences, an expanded project which argues that although recent investigation of pain has opened up historical narratives of medical literature, humanities scholars continue to face certain ambiguities regarding the nature of these phenomena. Discussing the scholarly encounter between literature and psychology of mood disorders, pain, narrative structure, and information processing, this book questions and challenges contemporary obsession with analytical approaches which tend to scientize or historicize human feeling by undermining the cognitive-narrative progress of painful moods and via attending merely to the medical reception of texts. This is a cross-disciplinary project in practice, bringing together both literary scholars’ and psychologists’ views of pain and emotional writing.
Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Otherness: Embodying Multimodal Aesthetics, eds. Nick Davis, Maryam Farahani, Ian Schermbrucker (Texts and Embodiments in Perspective Series. Newcastle: CSP, 2016).
In this volume, scholars of literary studies address exoticism and meaning-making in the cultural and transnational context of the Romantic age, as it is received and studied today. This book traces traditional images of “otherness” through various modes of communication in nineteenth-century word-image deployments, reviewing historical and contemporary adaptations and renditions. To this end, editors have drawn a four-way cross-cultural dialogue between illness/ugliness narratives, alternative poetics, consciousness, and semiotic dimension, in a series of essays by international leading scholars.
Conference Projects and Future Proceedings Silence: A Semiotics of (in)Significance.
Forthcoming conference at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1-3 July 2015: [http://melancholyandpain.liv.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Silence-CFP.pdf]. This conference runs in July 2015, for which I have been acting as co-organiser and lead researcher. Peer-reviewed abstracts are lined up for selection in a forthcoming edited volume (2017-18) on the topic of “silence”. I am also presenting a paper on Madeleine L’Engle’s aesthetic legacy in this conference.