Alison Hickey
Associate Professor of English
Specialist in English Romanticism; teaches Romantic Poetry and other literature courses with an emphasis on poetry.
My main field of research is Romanticism; my teaching interests center on English Romantic poetry and extend forward in time to contemporary British, Irish, and American poetry and back as far as Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and other 17th-century writers. From time to time, I make a foray into Comparative Literature, my undergraduate major.
I regularly teach Romantic and Victorian poetry, a first-year seminar called Creating Memory, and a cross-listed English and Environmental Studies course, From “Nature Poetry” to Ecopoetics. My recurring 300-level courses include Love, Sex, and Imagination in Romantic Poetry; Romantic Siblings; and Keats and Shelley.
Publications include a book on Wordsworth (Impure Conceits) and essays, book chapters, and reviews in Studies in Romanticism, ELH, and The Cambridge History of English Poetry. For my work on literary collaboration, I have held a Bunting Institute Fellowship and received funding from the NEH.
I have two sons in their twenties. I love listening to music, playing with words, walking, bicycling, traveling to new places and revisiting old familiar ones, and singing with the Back Bay Chorale. I'm an avid consumer of audiobooks and podcasts.
Education
- B.A., Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges
- M.A., Yale University
- M.Phil, Yale University
- Ph.D., Yale University
Current and upcoming courses
Participants in this seminar will delve into the workings of memory--a term that encompasses several different kinds of remembering and recollecting. What makes something memorable? Can we choose or shape what we remember? Does memory constitute identity? How has technology altered what and how we remember? As we ponder such questions, our primary focus will be on literature (including Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Nabokov, and Toni Morrison). We'll also draw on philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science and explore creative arts such as drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, book arts, film, and music. Students will write in several genres--creative, critical, and reflective-and experiment with different ways of collecting, curating, and presenting memories in media of their choice.
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Romantic Poetry
ENG241
Essential works of a group of poets unsurpassed in poetic achievement and influence: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats. Selected writings of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans. We’ll explore and interrogate prominent themes of Romanticism, including imagination, memory, creation; childhood, nature, the self; sympathy, empathy; questions of representation (for example, what issues arise when white, European, and for the most part male writers attempt to represent or “give voice” to “others”?); envisioning social justice; the lure of the unknown or unknowable; inspiration as "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; dejection and writer's block, bipolar poetry; influence (from opium to "the viewless wings of Poesy"); beauty, truth, fancy, illusion; rebellion, revolution, transgression, exile; the Byronic hero, the femme fatale, the muse; complexity, ambiguity, mystery, doubt; mortality, immortality. Open to majors and non-majors. No poetry background required. -
How do siblings, sibling relationships, and conceptions of brotherhood and sisterhood figure in Romantic-period authorship and texts? What is particularly Romantic about sisters and brothers? We'll consider such questions from several different angles, looking, for example, at the following: representations of siblings in literary texts; sister-brother writers (but also the importance of non-writing siblings); the relation of genius to genes; the complications of step-siblings, half-siblings, and siblings-in-law; the overlap or conflict of sibling relationships with friendship, marriage, romantic love, and self-love; and brotherhood as metaphor (revolutionary, abolitionist, Christian). Texts by Joanna Baillie, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, DeQuincey, Byron, Austen (Sense and Sensibility), M. Shelley (Frankenstein), P. Shelley, Keats.
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The Victorian period, spanning roughly eight decades of literary tradition and innovation between Romanticism and Modernism, gave rise to some of the most memorable and best-loved works of literature in the English language: The texts for this course--mostly poems, some essays and short fiction, one play--include writings of Tennyson, Browning, Emily Brontë, the Rossettis and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Arnold, Hopkins, Wilde, Hardy, fin-de-siècle Aesthetes and Decadents, early Yeats, and World War I poet Wilfred Owen. They are evocative, emotionally powerful, idiosyncratic, psychologically loaded, intellectually engaged, sensual, daring, inspiring, harrowing, and bizarre. We'll trace thematic and stylistic connections, analyzing diverse representations of love, longing, loss, the power and limits of words, Medievalism, marriage and its discontents, gender dynamics, the Woman Question, women's authorship, queer eroticism, beauty, art, artifice, aesthetic and sensual pleasures, pain, suffering, sacrifice, the pity of war, repression, depravity, "madness," spiritual crisis, the horrors of war, and fears for the future of civilization. A Book Arts workshop and readings from Pater, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, and William Morris will further illuminate the role of artists, artisans, and consumers of art.