Dr Nicholas Halmi

University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period, Oxford University

Margaret Candfield Fellow and Praelector in English, University College

Contact Details

(e) Email Dr Halmi
(w) Nicholas Halmi’s webpage

Research Interests

Nicholas Halmi’s research is concerned broadly with three fundamental issues, one methodological, the second historical, and the third both methodological and historical. The first is the use of synecdochical concepts in intellectual discourse (by Romantic theorists of the symbol, Freud, Walter Benjamin, et al.), synecdoche being a particularly complex and interesting figure with important epistemological implications. The second is the response in European (particularly British and German) literature, philosophy, and visual arts of the ‘long eighteenth century’ to the challenges and discontents of modernity. The third, which is closely related to the first two, is Romantic encyclopedics in the widest sense, that is, the systematic organization of knowledge. His book The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol addressed all of these issues by way of explaining what intellectual purposes the formulation of the Romantic concept of the symbol – which has caused much contention in critical theory since the 1960s-served in the Romantic period itself. More recently, Dr Halmi has been writing about the understanding of history in the long eighteenth century, specifically as manifested on the one hand in the aestheticization of the past in poetry, painting, and architecture of the time, and on the other hand in the relation of the Romantics’ self-consciously new literary forms – especially in Byron’s poetry – to traditional genres and genre theory.

Dr Halmi has also done a good deal of scholarly editing (of Coleridge in particular), and he is currently completing a Norton Critical Edition of Wordsworth, and am an advisory editor of Oxford University Press’s Oxford Scholarly Editions Online project

Selective Publications

Books

Editor, Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition, in progress)

Co-editor, Inventions of the Imagination: Romanticism and Beyond (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2011)

The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (OUP, 2007)

Editor, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, vol. 14 of the Collected Writings of Northrop Frye (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2004)

Co-editor, Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition, 2003)

Textual editor, Opus Maximum, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton Univ. Press, 2002)

Chapters and Articles

‘Coleridge’s Ecumenical Spinoza’, in Beth Lord (ed.), Spinoza beyond Philosophy (Edinburgh Univ. Press, forthcoming 2012)

‘Telling Stories about Romantic Theory’, European Romantic Review (forthcoming 2012)

‘Byron between Ariosto and Tasso’, in Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (eds.), Dante and Italy in British Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 39–53
‘Ruins without a Past’, Essays in Romanticism, 18 (2011), 7–27

‘The Very Model of a Modern Epic Poem’, European Romantic Review, 21 (2010), 589–600 [on Byron’s Don Juan]

‘Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol’, in Frederick Burwick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (OUP, 2009), 345–58

Forward to Rome: The Life and Legacy of Andrea Palladio’, The London Magazine, March/April 2009

‘Coleridge’s Most Unfortunate Borrowing from A. W. Schlegel’, in Christoph Bode and Sebastian Domsch (eds.), British and European Romanticisms (Trier: WVT, 2007), 131–42

‘Greek Myths, Christian Mysteries, and the Tautegorical Symbol’, The Wordsworth Circle, 36 (2005), 6–8

‘Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry’, Essays in Criticism, 55 (2005), 159–72

Introduction to ‘Opera and Nineteenth-Century Literature’, guest-edited special issue of Romanticism on the Net, 34/35 (May/August 2004)

‘Lucy, Lucia, and Locke’, Romanticism on the Net, 34/35 (May/August 2004) [on Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor and Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor]

‘How Coleridge Was Wilder than Byron’, Romanticism, 10 (2004), 144–57

‘The Metaphysical Context of Frye’s Monadology’, in Jeffrey Donaldson and Alan Mendelson (eds.), Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye (University of Toronto Press, 2004), 97–104

Seven articles in C. J. Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 2 vols. (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004): ‘Art and Classical Antiquity’, ‘Boullée, Étienne-Louis’ (French architect), ‘Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich’ (German philosopher and novelist), ‘Klenze, Leo von’ (German architect), ‘Robinson, Henry Crabb’ (English diarist and journalist), ‘Schinkel, Karl Friedrich’ (German architect and painter), ‘Symbol and Allegory’

‘Walter Benjamin’s Unacknowledged Romanticism’, Lingua Humanitatis, 2 (2002), 163–82

‘Mind as Microcosm’, European Romantic Review, 12 (2001), 43–52

‘Why Coleridge Was Not a Freudian’, Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams, 7 (1997), 13–28

‘How Christian Is the Coleridgean Symbol?’ The Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), 26–30

‘An Anthropological Approach to the Romantic Symbol’, European Romantic Review, 4 (1993), 13–33

‘From Hierarchy to Opposition: Allegory and the Sublime’, Comparative Literature, 44 (1992), 337–60