Publications

Books and Journal Special Issues:

  • Close Reading as Attentional Practice, with Ewan Jones (forthcoming 2024/5)
  • Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature, with Atti Viragh (forthcoming 2024/5)
  • Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet, a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018).
  • The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, 2016; issued in paperback, 2018).
  • The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge University Press, 2013; issued in paperback, 2016).
  • Michael Field, The Poet (1880-1914): Published and Manuscript Materials (Broadview Press, 2009). 400 pages. Arts and Humanities Research Council funded; and nominated for Modern Language Association 2011 Prize for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition.
  • Michael Field’ (1880-1914): Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2007; issued in paperback, 2010).
  • Fin-de-Siècle Literary Culture and Women Poets, a special edition of Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006). 300 pages.
  • Poetry of the 1890s (Penguin; Second Edition).

Essays and Articles:

  • ‘Palgrave’s Golden Treasury: “Modern” poetry and a new Lyric Canon’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1860s, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 75-93.
  • ‘Technologies of Attention: Cultural Forms and Attention Theory at the Turn of the Century’, in CUSP (Journal of Late 19th– /Early 20th-Century Cultures) 1.1 (Winter 2023), pp. 35-44. This was part of an award winning journal special issue (awarded Best New Journal by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals).
  • ‘Aesthetic Perception and Embodied Cognition: Art and Literature at the Fin de Siècle’ (part of the AHRC-funded History of Distributed Cognition project), in Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism, ed. Miranda Anderson, Peter Garratt and Mark Sprevak (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 79-94.
  • ‘Parnassian Cosmopolitanism: Transnationalism and Poetic Form, Victorian Poetry 57.4 (Winter 2019). Translated and published in French by the International Network for the Study of Lyric (http://www.lyricology.org/).
  • Review of Elisa Bizzotto and Stefano Evangelista (ed) Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic, Vagabond. Comparative Critical Studies (2020).
  • ‘Theorizing Queer Before Queer Theory’, Los Angeles Review of Books (Jan 2020).
  • ‘Arthur Symons’ Impressionist Epistemology: Decadence and Embodied Cognition’, English Literature in Transition 63.1 (Jan 2020) 48-72.
  • ‘A View from the United States:  the Crisis in the Humanities; the Liberal Arts; and English in the Military Academy’, in English: Shared Futures, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Gail Marshall (Boydell and Brewer, 2018).
  • ‘Distracted Reading: Acts of Attention in the Age of the Internet’ (editorial essay), special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018).
  • Reconstructing Brandon (1998-1999): A Cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities Study of Shu Lea Cheang’s Early Web Artwork’, co-authored with Deena Engel, Lauren Hinkson, Joanna Phillips (a collaboration with Computer Science at NYU, and with curators and conservators at the Guggenheim Museum, NYC), Digital Humanities Quarterly: 12.2 (2018).
  • ‘Digitizing the Diary: Experiments in Queer Encoding’, Journal of Victorian Culture 2016 (a ‘Perspective’ piece: ‘The Perspective invites leading scholars to appraise the critical practices and traditions of Victorian studies’).
  • ‘What Kind of a Critical Category is “Women’s Poetry”?’ (2003), reprinted in Nineteenth Century Poetry: Criticism and Debates, ed. Emma Mason and Jonathan Herapath (Routledge, 2016).
  • ‘Lyric’,  in The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Dino F. Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes (Blackwell, 2015).
  • ‘Textual Artifacts and their Digital Representations’, Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 9.1 (2015), n.p. (refereed online journal).
  • Affective Form: Hardy’s Sculptural Aesthetic’ The Thomas Hardy Journal Vol. 30 (Autumn 2014), pp. 66-82 (ISSN: 0268-5418)
  • ‘Decadent Forms: Parnassus in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Decadent Poetics, ed. Jason Hall and Alex Murray (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
  • ‘Thomas Hardy’s Poetics of Touch’, Victorian Poetry 51.2 (2013). pp. 129-45.
  • ‘Desire Lines: Swinburne and Lyric Crisis’, in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista (Manchester University Press, 2012).
  • ‘Editing Michael Field’, in Writing Women of the Fin de Siècle: Authors of Change, ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
  • ‘The Beehive’, Victorian Review 36.2 (2010), pp. 23- 27.
  • ‘Poetry’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 223-240.
  • ‘Modernist Homage to the fin de siècle’, The Yearbook of English Studies 37.1 (2007), pp. 22-40.
  • ‘Apian Aestheticism: Michael Field and the Economics of the Aesthetic’, in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson (Rivendale Press: 2007), pp. 222-236.
  • ‘Fin-de-Siècle Renaissance: Diversity, History, Modernity’, by Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo, Journal of Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006), pp. 389-403.
  • ‘”Damnable Aestheticism” and the Turn to Rome: John Gray, Michael Field, and a Poetics of Conversion’, in The fin-de-siècle Poem, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio: Ohio University press, 2005), pp. 311-336.
  • ‘The Hermeneutic and the Aesthetic: Beyond New Historicism’, editorial for Literature Compass (Blackwell) 2005.
  • ‘What Kind of a Critical Category is “Women’s Poetry”?’, Victorian Poetry 41.4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 575-584.
  • ‘The British Library Manuscripts of Michael Field’ (Adam Matthew, 2003); an essay on the nature of Michael Field’s life -writing, contained within the guide to Michael Field and Fin-de-Siècle Culture and Society (see ‘Editorial Work’ below).
  • ‘”Scientific Wooing”: Constance Naden’s Marriage of Science and Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 41:1 (2003), pp. 151-169.
  • ‘Constance Naden’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers (Thoemmes, 2002).
  • ‘May Kendall’, in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing, Volume 240 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001), pp. 118-123.
  • ‘An “Uncomfortable Intersection”: The Meeting of Contemporary Urban and Rural Environments in the Poetry of Simon Armitage’, Worldviews 5 (2001), pp. 58-79.
  • ‘Michael Field’ and Poetic Identity (London: The Eighteen Nineties Society, 2000; hardbound and paperback). Short monograph: 50 pages.
  • ‘May Probyn’ in Victorian Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing, Volume 199 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1998), pp. 243-252.
  • ‘”Love’s Mirror”: Constance Naden and Reflections on a Feminist Poetics’,  English Literature in Transition 41:1 (1998), pp. 25-41.

Editorial Work:

  • General Editor for ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition’, a new scholarly book series by Cambridge University Press.
  • Editorial Board member for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies (soon to be launched by Edinburgh University Press)
  • Advisory Board member for the Central Online Victorian Educator (publishing peer-reviewed Victorian material), affiliated with the North American Victorian Studies Association (2017-onwards)
  • Archive Lead: The Online Diaries of Michael Field
  • Advisory Board member for the journal Victorian Poetry
  • Editorial Advisory Board (2017-onwards): Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadent Studies.
  • Editor of the Victorian Section (2003-2008): Literature Compass: on-line literature journal.
  • Editor and Consultant for Archival Project: Michael Field and Fin-de-Siècle Culture and Society (Adam Matthew: 2003). 13 reels of microfilm with a 50 page guide.

Blog Posts and Reports:

‘The Humanities in the UK Today: What is Actually Going on?’ Lead author, co-written with a group of UK leaders in the Humanities (forthcoming from Higher Education Policy Institute)

‘Radical Interdisciplinarity’; Times Higher Education (18 July, 2021): https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/post-pandemic-recovery-requires-radical-interdisciplinarity

‘The Arts and Humanities: Shaping the Future’; a blog post for Advance HE: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/arts-and-humanities-shaping-future (November 2020).

‘English’; a blog post for the Institute of English studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London): https://englishstudies.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2020/11/24/english/  (24 November, 2020).

Reception of The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity: ‘This is a brilliantly conceived book, showing how Aestheticist lyrics, despite their frequent use of antiquated forms, actively engage with the concerns of modernity. In arguing that the rhetorical strategies adopted by these poems are not proto-Modernist but rather “post-Victorian” — self-consciously playing on earlier works, in the manner of postmodernism — Thain offers truly fresh insight, not only into this particular corpus of fin-de-siècle literature but into the possibilities of the lyric genre itself.’ Erik Gray, Columbia University