Goldsmiths - University of London

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Professor Alan Downie

Position held:
Professor of English

Phone:
+44 (0)20 7919 7447

Email:
a.downie (@gold.ac.uk)

Address:
Room 510
5th Floor
Warmington Tower

Office hours:
On leave for the academic year 2011-12

BA (Hons), MLitt, PhD, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Stott Fellow, University of Wales, 1975-7; Lecturer in English Literature, Leeds University, 1977-8; appointed Goldsmiths College, 1978.

Teaching

On study leave for the 2011-2012 session

Areas of supervision

  • The novel, especially between 1660 and 1820
  • Detective/crime fiction
  • Literature and politics between 1590 and 1832
  • Satire

Professional activities

  • Member of the Advisory Boards of Literature-Compass, Marlowe Studies, The Scriblerian and Swift Studies
  • Editor of Pickering & Chatto’s Eighteenth Century Political Biographies series

Research interests

My research interests range from literature and politics c. 1590 to c. 1832, including the history of the book, newspapers, and pamphlets to the early novel, and Defoe, Swift, and the Scriblerian satirists. I have recently published on Christopher Marlowe, Henry Fielding and Jane Austen. Currently, I am editing The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

Selected publications

Books
  • A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (Pickering & Chatto, 2009)
  • Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge University Press, 1979, 2008)
  • To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750 (Macmillan, 1994)
  • Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)
  • I'd Rather Be Reading Jane Austen: The Appeal of the Augustans (Goldsmiths College, 1995)
  • Shakespeare: Hamlet (Goldsmiths College, 1999)
  • Shakespeare: Amleto (Lindau, 1991)

    • Edited Books
  • Henry Fielding In Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
  • Constructing Christopher Marlowe, edited with J. T. Parnell (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
  • Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, Vol. 6: 'The Poor Man's Plea' (1698) and 'The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd' (1724) (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006)
  • Political and Economical Writings of Daniel Defoe, Vol. 2: Party Politics (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000)
  • Telling People What to Think: Early-Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from 'The Review' to 'The Rambler', co-edited with T. N. Corns (Frank Crass, 1993)
  • Swift, Temple and the Du Cros Affair Part II: 'A Letter from Monsieur de Cros' (1693) and 'Reflections upon Two Pamphlets (1693) (The Augustan Reprint Society, 1987)

    • Articles
  • 'Reviewing What We Think We Know about Christopher Marlowe, Again' in Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page, edited by Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 33-46.
  • 'Rehabilitating Sir Thomas Bertram', Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 50 (2010), pp. 739-758.
  • 'Periodicals, the Book Trade and the "Bourgeois Public Sphere"', Media History, vol. 14, no. 3 (December 2008), pp. 261-271.
  • 'Henry Fielding, Magistrate' in Henry Fielding in Our Time, edited by J. A. Downie (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 113-131.
  • 'Review Essay: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 20, no. 4 (Summer 2008), pp. 563-570. 
  • 'Gulliver's Travels, the Contemporary Debate on the Financial Revolution, and the Bourgeois Public Sphere' in Money, Power, and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles, edited by Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske (University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 115-134.
  • 'Gulliver's Fourth Voyage and Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding' in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fifth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, edited by Hermann J. Real (Wilhelm Fink, 2008), pp. 453-464.
  • 'Swift's Corinna Reconsidered', Swift Studies, vol. 22 (2007), pp. 161-168.
  • 'Marlowe, May 1593, and the "Must-Have" Theory of Biography', Review of English Studies, vol. 58 (June 2007), pp. 245-267.
  • 'Swift's "A Description of the Morning" (1709), II. 11-12 and 14 Reconsidered', The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, N. S., vole. 20, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 26-29.
  • 'Who Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novels', Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (2006), pp. 69-84.
  • 'Public and Private: The Myth of the Bourgeois Public Sphere' in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, edited by Cynthia Wall (Blackwell, 2005), pp. 58-79.
  • 'Public Opinion and the Political Pamphlet' in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, edited by John Richetti (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 549-571.
  • 'What if Delarivier Manley Did Not Write The secret History of Queen Zarah?', The Library, 7th series, vol. 5 (September 2004), pp. 247-264.
  • 'How Useful to Eighteenth-Century Studies is the Paradigm of the "bourgeois public sphere"?', Literature Compass, vol. 1 (2003), 18C 022, 1-18.
  • '"The Coffee Hessy split" and Other Issues in Swift's Biography' in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, edited by Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 65-75.
  • 'Literature and Drama' in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, edited by H. T. Dickinson (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 329-343.
  • 'New Wine in Old Bottles: The "New Historicism" and the Eighteenth Century' in Talking Forward, Talking Back: Critical Dialogues with the Enlightenment, edited by Kevin L. Cope and Rüdiger Ahrens (AMS Press, 2002), pp. 265-279.
  • 'The Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels' in Jonathan Swift, 'Gulliver's Travels': A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Alberto J. Rivero (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), pp. 334-352.
  • 'Marlowe: Facts and Fictions' in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, edited by J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 13-29.
  • 'Johnson's Politics', The Age of Johnson, vol. 11 (2000), pp. 81-104.
  • 'Mary Davys's "Probable Feign'd Stories" and Critical Shibboleths about "The Rise of the Novel"', Eighteenth-Century Fictions, vol. 12, nos. 2-3 (January-April 2000), pp. 309-326.
  • 'Swift and Locke's Two Treatises of Government' in Swift: The Enigmatic Dean: Festschrift for Hermann Josef Real, edited by Rudolf Freiburg, Arno Löffler and Wolfgang Zach (Stauffenberg, 1998), pp. 27-34.
  • 'Swift and Jacobitism', ELH, vol. 64, no. 4 (Winter 1997), pp. 887-901.
  • 'The Making of the English Novel', Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 9, no. 3 (April 1997), pp. 249-266.
  • 'Defoe's Early Writings', The Review of English Studies, vol. 46 (1995), pp. 225-230.