Dr Bonnie Latimer
Profiles

Dr Bonnie Latimer

Associate Head of School - English and Creative Writing

Role

I have worked at Plymouth since 2010, and in that time, I've helped to develop a curriculum in early modern, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature that is driven by my research in the novel and satire, 1660-1800.


My first book was on the novelist Samuel Richardson, and since then, I've published a series of articles and book-chapters on Richardson and his relationship to eighteenth-century culture. Other research interests include satire of this period, and I have recently contributed an invited chapter on Alexander Pope to the Oxford Handbook to Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019). I co-edit the Routledge series New Textual Studies.

I am always delighted to hear from prospective PhD and ResM students. Previous completed supervisions include work on Thomas Gray, Henry Fielding, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Plymouth's unique archive, the Cottonian Collection. Do contact me if you would like to discuss your proposal.

Qualifications

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), July 2013

PhD, Leeds, January 2007

M St, Exeter College, Oxford, June 2001

BA Hons, Exeter College, Oxford, June 2000

Professional membership

British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2005-

Teaching interests

I teach primarily in the period c. 1660-1830, and teaching interests include early-modern gender, the emergent novel, gender and Romanticism, the gothic, and literary analysis of 'non-literary' early-modern texts, such as conduct literature, sermons, and so forth.


I am particularly interested in moving research into the classroom, and have contributed to student-friendly guides to the period such as the Continuum Eighteenth-Century Literature Handbook (2009), as well as co-editing the major print/ digital Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789 (2015), which provides a comprehensive resource introducing students and others to cutting-edge scholarship in the field.

I am especially keen to teach and supervise on authors on whom I've published, including Restoration dramatists and poets, Scriblerians such as Gay, Pope, and Swift, early popular novelists such as Behn and Haywood, mid-century novelists and cultural critics such as Richardson, Jane Collier, Charlotte Lennox, and others, as well as a wide gamut of later-century 'Romantic-era' women writers, including Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Inchbald.

Research interests

My research interests have so far focused on the work of the mid-eighteenth-century sentimental novelist and printer, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Particularly, I've been interested in how re-reading his work through the concerns and debates manifest in his last novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), help us to gain new insights both into Richardson's earlier work and into the mid- and late-century novel more generally.

I've published in recent years on Richardson and marriage, on Mary Wollstonecraft's adaptation for children of Grandison, on Richardson's influence on the feminist novelist Sarah Scott, and on Richardson's use of Anglican devotional memes. My current, final piece of work on Richardson centres on the relationship between Grandison and the controversial piece of legislation 26 Geo. II, 26, or Jewish Naturalization Act.

Subsidiary research interests include the poetry of Alexander Pope, on whose work I published my first article, and on the relationship between early modern science and literature, which will be the focus of my next project. 

Research groups

  • English and Creative Writing

Forthcoming:

I have recently been invited to submit essays to several projects now in preparation: The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press), Samuel Richardson in Context (Cambridge University Press), The Oxford Companion to Eighteenth-Century Satire (Oxford University Press), and a special edition of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

In print:

'Samuel Richardson and the "Jew Bill" of 1753: A new political context for Sir Charles Grandison', Review of English Studies 66: 275 (2015), 520-539.

'Samuel Richardson and Philip Carteret Webb's "little paper" on the Jewish Naturalization Act', Notes & Queries 259:3 (2014), 404-6.

Review essay: 'The eighteenth-century novel' in The Year's Work in English Studies 93 (2014), 560-581.

Making Gender, Culture and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual (Ashgate Press, 2013).

Review essay: 'The eighteenth-century novel' in The Year's Work in English Studies 92 (2013), 514-525.

‘Courting Dominion: Sir Charles Grandison, Sir George Ellison, and the organising principle of masculinity’, The Eighteenth-Century Novel (vol. 9, 2012).

‘Pious frauds: “Honest tricks” and the Anglican tradition in Richardson’, special issue of Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Jeremy Gregory, 32: 3 (2009), 339-351.

‘Leaving little to the imagination: The mechanics of didacticism in two children’s adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s novels’, The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, special issue on eighteenth-century didactic fiction for children, 33: 2 (2009), 167-88.

‘Apprehensions of controul: The familial politics of marriage, choice, and consent in Sir Charles Grandison’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31: 1 (2009), 1-19.

 ‘Alchemies of satire: A history of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock’, The Review of English Studies, 57: 232 (2006), 684-700.

 

Reports & invited lectures

Invited speaker at Oxford University's Restoration to Reform seminar series, February 2013

Peninsula Arts guest lecturer: 'Samuel Richardson's novel heroines', February 2012

Invited speaker at Northumbria University's eighteenth-century seminar series: 'Vox populi, vox dei: Samuel Richardson and the "Jew Bill" of 1753', January 2010