Professor Fergus McGhee

Research and Teaching

My research ranges widely across nineteenth-century literature and culture. My principal interests are in poetry and non-fiction prose, which I study in relation to visual culture, moral philosophy, and intellectual history. Rather than advancing from any pre-ordained theory or context, however, I believe the best criticism always begins from the text’s own expressive and inventive qualities. I therefore have a particular commitment to close reading and its creative possibilities.

My first book project, Darklier Understood: Knowing Persons in Victorian Poetry, traces the passionate, compromised quests to know people – oneself, one another, and God – in a wide range of Victorian poetry. From Robert Browning to Alice Meynell, poets across the period show how the failure to know people as surely, or as intimately, as we desire may produce a host of unsuspected possibilities and pleasures. Bringing close readings of poetry into conversation with contemporary essayists and philosophers (Emerson, Ruskin, Pater, Newman, McTaggart), this study builds on Stanley Cavell's thinking about language and scepticism to reveal a new dimension of Victorian moral psychology and literary creativity. I also show how poetic form can offer distinctive resources to ethical reflection, expanding accounts of literature's moral value beyond familiar claims bound up with narrative and otherness. 

My second book, The Art of Indistinctness, studies the broad cultural debate – stretching across the nineteenth century – about indistinctness as a tool of literary and artistic expression. Beginning with John Ruskin’s spirited defence of Turner’s painting, I show how Victorian criticism thinks carefully about the nature and value of indistinctness, and how this discussion nurtured and responded to formal innovations in painting and poetry. Throughout the book, I relate these developments to nineteenth-century moral debate and psychological inquiry.

At Corpus, I teach across three ‘period’ papers, covering literature of all kinds from 1800 to the present day, as well as the first-year paper on the theory and practice of criticism. For the Faculty, I’ve taught specialist papers on life-writing and poetry and the visual arts. This year I’m giving lectures on a variety of subjects, from poetry to the philosophy of literature to nineteenth-century writing about art.