Dr David Stewart

David Stewart is a specialist in Romantic-period literature and culture. He has published three books and over 20 articles and chapters on topics including periodicals, print culture, poetic form, periodisation, the city, landscape, and mobility.

His first monograph, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), explores the decade following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in which the literary magazine rose to prominence. It claims the magazine as a form unusually well-placed to explore and reflect creatively upon a literary culture that was expanding so rapidly writers and readers could not keep up. It considers a wide range of magazines and writers, most centrally the periodicals of Leigh Hunt, Blackwood's Magazine, the London Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine.

His second book, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), explores the poetry of a period often depicted as a dead end between Romanticism and Victorianism. Drawing on new data about the publishing market, the book shows that poetry publication was in fact buoyant: it considers the work of a range of poets including Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hood, and the literary annuals. Yet it was a 'period of doubt' because poets began to question the place of poetry in culture. The complex forms their poems took are worth prizing exactly in their doubtful self-questioning.

He is the co-editor, with John Gardner, of Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2024). This volume collects an international group of scholars to reimagine a decade usually ignored as an unproductive gap between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The decade is in fact extraordinarily busy, with new cultural forms around the globe developing to take the temperature of this self-conscious decade. 

Other publications include considerations of the development of the short story, celebrity in the periodical press, literary London, Lord Byron at the Newcastle Literary & Philosophical Society, periodisation, accidental poetry, and Wordsworthian parody. His current work focuses on topics including landscape and literary form with a special interest in the work of James Hogg and Walter Scott.

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• Introduction, Stewart, D., Gardner, J. 6 Jun 2024, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
• Landscape, Stewart, D. 7 May 2024, The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose, Oxford, Oxford University Press
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Chronicler of the 1830s, Stewart, D. 6 Jun 2024, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
• Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s, Gardner, J., Stewart, D. 6 Jun 2024
• Keyword: Doubt, Stewart, D. 18 Nov 2022, Remediating the 1820s, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press
• On a Spree with Pierce Egan's Life in London, Stewart, D. 1 Jul 2022
• “A quivering quick-sand”: romantic Border aesthetics, Stewart, D. 29 Oct 2021, In: Studies in Scottish Literature
• Poetry’s Variety: Clare and the Poetic Scene in the 1820s and 1830s, Stewart, D. 23 Oct 2020, Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, London, Palgrave Macmillan
• Genuine Border Stories: James Hogg, Fiction, and Mobility in the 1830s, Stewart, D. 31 Dec 2018, In: Yearbook of English Studies
• The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt, Stewart, D. 2018

• Lyndsey Skinner Literary Print Culture and the Romantic Canon Start Date: 08/10/2013
• Julia Ditter Thinking Through Scotland: Literary Form, Borders and the Environmental Imagination Start Date: 01/10/2019 End Date: 25/01/2023
• Eloise Scott Imagining London: Romantic Literature and Urban Space Start Date: 18/01/2021
• Sarah Lill 'The Father of the Cheap Press': Edward Lloyd and the Mass-Market Periodical,1830-1855 Start Date: 04/10/2011 End Date: 21/05/2015
• Leighton Wright ‘Writers, Publishers, And Readers: Popular Romanticism In The Marketplace’ Start Date: 01/10/2015 End Date: 06/11/2019

• English Literature PhD September 01 2005
• Fellow (FHEA) Higher Education Academy (HEA) 2009