Dr Michael Sanders - research

Current research projects:

I have recently completed a monograph on Chartist poetry, entitled The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.  This study argues that ‘Chartist poetry’ currently exists as a complex of aesthetic, historical and sociological problems rather than a properly defined category of literary history. My interest is in Chartist poetry as a praxis which is simultaneously aesthetic and political and, therefore, in the individual Chartist poem as an aesthetic text, a political text and an historical text.

This project arises out of my main area of research which is the literature and culture of the early Victorian period. I am also interested in working-class literature and culture more generally. 

My publications include; a scholarly edition of Benjamin Disraeli's first novel Vivian Grey for the Pickering and Chatto series - The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli  (2004), a four-volume collection of primary materials, Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge 2001), as well as articles in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Women: A Cultural Review.