ENGLISH

Jefferson Holdridge

• Northern Irish Poetry Project
  Awarded $35,000 for the period 8/1/07–12/31/08
  Source: National Endowment for the Arts

Wake Forest University Press will publish a volume of Northern Irish poetry.

• WFU Series of Irish Poetry, Volume 2
  Awarded $8,000 for the period 1/1/06 to 12/31/07
  Source:NEA

Wake Forest University Press publishes representative anthologies meant to introduce a number of contemporary Irish poets whose work has not appeared widely in North America. The inaugural volume featured Harry Clifton, Dennis O'Driscoll, David Wheatley, Sinéad Morrissey, and Caitríona O'Reilly. From the burgeoning economic realities of the “Celtic Tiger” to the burden of religious and political realignment, from urban scenes to historical landscapes, these poets sensitively record the effects of writing in a dramatically shifting society. However, they do not write solely from historical or social contexts but also out of psychological compulsions or mythic modes. Whatever the subject, their writing shows an awareness of the formal traditions and tensions of Irish poetry.

Claudia Kairoff

• Anne Finch: A Critical Edition and Digital Archive
  Awarded $37,551 for the period 7/1/11 to 6/30/13
  Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)/UNC Greensboro

In an era known for the public and political poetry of Dryden, Swift, and Pope, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), articulated a different literary and political authority. Once at the center of court and then an internal exile, she explored the spiritual condition as inextricable from social and political phenomena. By constructing the first scholarly edition of her complete works, Jennifer Keith (UNC-G) and Claudia Kairoff (WFU) will provide an accurate, critical record of her texts and their historical, political, and literary contexts. A digital archive will include images of selected manuscripts, fully searchable documents of the most interesting poems with several versions or significant variants that demonstrate Finch’s creative process and highlight the works’ transmission. The combination of print and open-access resources will enable scholars and students to explore how Finch’s work articulates and connects the domains of politics, personal desire, spiritual ideals, and women’s art and experience.

• with Jennifer Keith, Associate Professor of English, UNC-G

The Works of Anne Finch
Long-term residential fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library
Scholarly Editions and Translations
Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

The partnership will complete the first critical edition of The Works of Anne Finch, which will be published in two volumes by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Of the approximately 230 poems and two plays known to be hers, 112 poems and both plays appear in the folio manuscript, “Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia,” housed at the Folger. In an era known for the public and political poetry of Dryden, Swift, and Pope, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), articulated a different literary and political authority. As a female aristocrat, once at the center of court and then an internal exile, she viewed the individual spiritual condition as inextricable from social and political life. Her work is crucial to placing abiding questions about politics, personal desire, spiritual ideals, and women’s artistry and experience in historical context.

Eric Wilson
The Occult Current: A Romantic Poetics of Electricity
Residential fellowship for the period 2003-2004
Source: National Humanities Center

Associate Professor of English Eric G. Wilson is among 42 scholars to win a National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship for 2003-2004. The award provides financial support and a stimulating environment for the best new work in the humanities at the center in Research Triangle Park. Dr. Wilson will work on his new book, .The Occult Current: A Romantic Poetics of Electricity. It argues that Coleridge and other British and American Romantic writers who responded to him—including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman—combined alchemical speculation and the science of electromagnetism to inspire an ecological vision and a corresponding naturalist poetics. The study examines the neglected alchemical and scientific subtexts of these writers’ literary works, leading to a wider theory relating human consciousness and natural processes, words and things, and magic and science.