Stephen Matterson

Stephen Matterson

B. A., Ph. D., F.T.C.D.
Professor of English
Head of the School of English (2006-2009)

Research and Teaching Interests:

19th and 20th century American literature generally. I’m especially interested in poetry, literature and race, literary nationalism, and the writings of Herman Melville. I currently teach courses in American literature, Poetry, and American Autobiography.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

Books:

American Literature: The Essential Glossary. London: Edward Arnold: New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Studying Poetry. London: Arnold and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. (With Darryl Jones).
Rebound: The American Poetry Book. Collection of critical essays, commissioned and edited with Michael Hinds. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press. (forthcoming).
The Collected Poems of Walt Whitman, selected with an introduction and notes, Wordsworth publications, Ware. (forthcoming).

Articles:

'"The Whole Habit of the Mind": Stevens, Americanness and the Use of Elsewhere.' In The Wallace Stevens Journal 25:2 (Fall 2001), pp. 111-121.
'Robert Lowell's Life Studies' in Blackwell's Companion to 20th Century Poetry ed. Neil Roberts Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 481-490.
'Shaped by Readers: The Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs', in Soft Canons: American Women Writers and the Masculine Tradition, ed. Karen L. Kilcup, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1999, pp. 82-96.
'A Life in Pictures: Harold Pinter’s The Last Tycoon.' Literature and Film Quarterly, 27 (1999), pp. 50-54.
'From Unreal to Hyper-real: Nathanael West's Los Angeles.' In Citta Reali E Immaginarie del Continente Americano, eds Cristina Giorcelli, Camilla Cattarulla, Anna Scacchi. Rome: Edizioni Associate Press, 1998, pp. 73-81.
'Tenth-Muse-ism, Or, The Discontinuity of American Poetry.' In The United States in Europe 1945-95, eds Rob Kroes and Cristina Giorcelli. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1997, pp. 255-261.
'Indian-Hater, Wild Man; Melville’s Confidence-Man.' Arizona Quarterly, 52 (1996) pp. 21-35.
'To Make it Mean Me: Frost’s North of Boston as a sequence.' In Rebound: The American Poetry Book. (forthcoming)
'He Lived Like A Rat: The Trickster In The Dream Songs.' In After Thirty Falls: Essays on John Berryman, eds Philip McGowan and Philip Coleman. (forthcoming)
'The New Criticism' in The Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh, Oxford University Press. (forthcoming)

Currently supervising research in the following areas:

Sylvia Plath and Influence; Wallace Stevens and Romanticism; Violence in Joyce Carol Oates; Nostalgia in John Updike and Don DeLillo; Autobiography in Philip Roth; Transsexual Autobiography.

Contact Details:

Stephen Matterson
Department of English
Trinity College
University of Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland.
Tel: + 353 1 896 1879.
Fax: + 353 1 671 7114.
e-mail: smttrson@tcd.ie

Last updated: July 16, 2007. Email: english@tcd.ie.