Adam Bridgen

Thesis Title: 'Where Blacks and Whites in scorching Valleys sweat': British Labouring-Class Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1660-1800

Supervisor: Abigail Williams

Doctoral Research: My research examines the significance of transatlantic slavery within works written by British labouring-class poets in the period 1660-1800. Rather than focusing on better-known working-class abolitionists from the eighteenth century's end, I turn to a number of neglected genres, authors, and works in order to trace a much longer history of labouring-class literary engagement with this subject. For the early part of my chronology, this means re-reading chapbooks, broadside ballads, and transportation accounts within the context of English colonisation, before exploring the emergence of slavery as a polemical theme within Grubstreet satire and the labouring-class 'anti-pastoral' of the 1730s onwards. Doing so suggests not only the extent to which labouring-class poets wrote on national and global themes during this period, but allows for a more complex and socially stratified historicisation of British writing on slavery. It also emphasises the ethical implications of the generic experimentalism of labouring-class poetry, which lent to a species of writing 'within and against' norms which resisted the frequent obfuscation of slavery's violence in highbrow texts while also enabling alternative, more inclusive imaginings of British nationhood.

Teaching:

I've taught broadly on literature between the period 1660-1830, including Papers 4 (1660-1760) and 5 (1760-1830) at LMH and Mansfield. I've also supervised undergraduate dissertations, on topics such as modern adaptions of Shakespeare's Othello, on eighteenth-century women's poetry, and on biblical quotation in African-American writing, and welcome any enquiries from potential supervisees.

Recent Outputs:

‘Defending “Reason’s rein”: Rationalism as Persuasive Strategy in Hannah More’s Slavery: A Poem (1788)’, in Hannah More in Context, ed. by Kerri Andrews and Sue Edney (Forthcoming - Routledge, Jan 2022)

‘A World of Fire and Drought: Ecosocialism, Improvement, and Apocalypse in James Woodhouse’s Crispinus Scriblerus’, in Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Empire, and Class, ed. by Ve-Yin Tee (Forthcoming - Edinburgh University Press, March 2022)

‘Patronage, Punch-Ups, and Polite Correspondence: The Radical Background of James Woodhouse’s Early Poetry’, Huntington Library Quarterly 80.1 (2017), 99-134. Read here, related blog post here 

Research Interests: Literature and empire, eighteenth-century English literature, Romanticism, working-class literature, women's writing, poetry and the lyric, ecocriticism, animal ethics, vegan studies.