Stephen Colclough, PhD

Name:

Stephen Colclough

Position:

Lecturer

Email:

els210@bangor.ac.uk

Location:

113 New Arts

Phone:

+44 (0)1248 383788

Enjoys Teaching

Victorian and twentieth-century literature, poetry of the Romantic period. At postgraduate level, I would welcome enquiries in the following areas: readers and reading practices 1700-1900; Victorian print culture; theories and methodologies associated with the sociology of texts and the history of the book; the poetry of the late Romantic period.

Research Interests

I have three areas of interest: readers and reading practices 1700-1900; Victorian and early twentieth-century print culture, and the late Romantic period, especially the poetry of John Clare.

My most recent research consists of a series of case studies looking at how ‘common’ (i.e. non-professional) readers record evidence of their reading practices in a range of different documents from manuscript books and autobiographies through to book club records.

I am also particularly interested in the expansion of British print culture during the period 1830-1920, working extensively on the archives of W.H. Smith & Son. Smith’s had a particular influence over the development of new forms of text (cheap periodicals, reprinted novels, spectacular advertising, wartime propaganda) and helped create new commercial strategies for getting these texts to the reader. I have written several articles and chapters on the new forms of text dissemination, such as railway bookstalls, commercial circulating libraries and advertising hoardings, that helped to produce the national print culture that we associate with the late Victorian period.

Finally, I also work on the poetry of the John Clare and Letitia Landon in relation to the new forms of publication (such as gift books and annuals) that became popular during the late Romantic period. My PhD thesis examined Clare’s early poetry and I have published several articles on his work.

Co-editor, Reviews (Eighteenth Century - Present), for English, the journal of the English Association.

If you are a lecturer in English, or a postgraduate student, with an interest in reviewing for the journal please send a brief list of your interests and expertise to: Englishjournal@bangor.ac.uk

Major Publications

Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695-1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

‘Readers: Books and Biography’, The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (London: Blackwell, 2007).

‘“No Such Bookselling Has Ever Before Taken Place”: W.H. Smith and Propaganda, 1917-1920’, Publishing and the First World War, ed. Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

‘The Railways’, The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Ambition and Industry 1800-1880, ed. Bill Bell (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2007)

‘ “A Grey Goose Quill and An Album”: The Manuscript Book and Text Transmission 1820-1850’, in Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, ed. Giles Mandelbrote et al (London and New Castle, Del.: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005).

‘ “Station to Station”: The LNWR and the Emergence of the Railway Bookstall, 1848-1875’, Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution Since 1500, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (London and New Castle, Del: British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005).

‘ “R R, A Remarkable Thing or Action”: John Dawson as Reader and Annotator’, Variants: the Journal for the Society of European Textual Scholarship 2/3 (2004), 61-78.

‘ “A Greater Outlay than any Return”: The Library of W. H. Smith & Son, 1860-1874’, Publishing History, 51 (2003), 67-93.

Reading Experience, 1700-1840: An Annotated Register of Sources for the History of Reading in the British Isles (Reading: Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History, 2000).

‘“Labour & Luxury”: Clare's Lost Pastoral and the Importance of the Voice of Labour in the Early Poems’, John Clare: New Voices, New Approaches, ed. John Goodridge and Simon Kovesi (Nottingham: John Clare Society, 2000).

Dr Colclough has also contributed chapters on ‘text distribution’ and ‘reading’ (the latter co-authored with David Vincent) to volume 6 (1830-1914) of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), edited by David McKitterick.

Current Support for Others' Research

2007- Coordinator, Publishing and Editing Research Group, School of English
2003- Management team, Reading Experience Database

Peer Recognition 2001-2007

2001-05 AHRC Research Fellow in Book History, Centre for Writing, Publishing and Printing History, in the Department of English, University of Reading.

2001- Associate Fellow, Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London