Dr Joshua Schouten De Jel

Qualifications

BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing (First Class Honours), University of Plymouth

MA English and Culture (with Distinction), University of Plymouth

PhD, University of Plymouth

Professional membership

British Association for Romantic Studies

Teaching interests

I teach on two first-year modules which span the 'long eighteenth century': ENGL402 - Writing the Modern World (1600-1700) and ENGL403 - Writing the Modern World (1700-1800). We consider the emergence of the British Empire, gender formation, the economic rise of the merchant class, Restoration literature, and the development of the novel and the Gothic as a genre, covering texts as various as William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Aphra Behn's Oronooko, Eliza Haywood's 'Fantomina,' Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and William Cowper's 'The Task.'

I also teach on two second-year modules: ENGL501 - Romanticism and ENGL509 - Women and Romanticism. These modules both tackle the poetic, as well as the philosophical, legacy of Romantic writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ann Radcliffe, alongside the aesthetic development of the sublime and the picturesque and contemporaneous social and political polemics such as industrialisation, national identity, and human rights.

Research interests

My primary research interest is Romantic literature, specifically the way in which classical mythology and philosophy came to be incorporated by William Blake as part of his private mythopoeia (but also as part of a wider Romantic aesthetic), questions relating to ontological formulations of self-identification and self-actualisation, as well as the theological discourses connected with the tradition of Dissent throughout the long eighteenth century. I have published an article on William Blake's response to the empirical methodologies of Enlightenment philosophers, concentrating on the role demonstration (i.e. scientific experiments) plays in the relegation of the subject as a purely material, and therefore corporeal, entity. I have also published an article on William Blake and Mary Shelley's incorporation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of childhood in terms of the symbiotic relationship between physical and psychological moulding.