Dr Anthony Howe

Dr Anthony Howe is Reader in English Literature and Director of Graduate Research in the School of English at Birmingham City University. Originally from the North East of England, he studied at Liverpool (BA; MA) before taking a PhD at Cambridge. Prior to his current post he taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He is a Senior Fellow of the HEA.

Dr Howe’s major research concern is in the field of English Romantic period poetry, especially Byron and Shelley.

His first monograph, Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool, 2013) has been described in the BARS Review as a ‘fine new study’, ‘well-written’, ‘full of insights’, and ‘combining a strong awareness of Byron’s various intellectual engagements with consistently persuasive interpretations of the poetry’. The Byron Journal writes that:

‘Howe’s work represents a promising turn in Byron studies. As we seek to explain and justify the role of literary studies and single-author studies in particular, texts like this one come to our aid ... One can hope that the conversations Howe begins in this book – on text, form, language, and politics – come to dominate Byron studies in the coming years’.

He is also co-editor, with Michael O’Neill, of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a major collection of essays that has become a key point of reference in Shelley studies. Christopher Stokes, writing in the Byron Journal, remarks that:

‘one cannot fail to be impressed … by a book that offers such a thorough and learned overview of all aspects of Shelley, whilst also striking any reader on any given page with sharp and surprising readings of individual moments, contexts or stanzas’.

Dr Howe is currently working on a new monograph, Letter Writing and the Romantic Poem, which will be the first book-length, scholarly and literary-critical study of Romantic period epistolary writing. The book will discuss epistolary culture and the material conditions of epistolary exchange in the period. There will also be chapter length studies of epistolary identity and the writing of poems into letters. Author-specific studies of Byron, Shelley and Keats as letter-writer poets, make up the remainder.

Related to this project is a collection of essays, Romanticism and the Letter, eds Madeleine Callaghan and Anthony Howe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), that brings together a range of world-leading Romanticists to discuss the period’s letter writing from a variety of new perspectives.

Dr Howe is an advisory editor to the Byron Journal and an editorial board member of the Keats-Shelley Review.