Professor Richard Marggraf Turley

Professor
BA, PhD (Leeds) Photograph of Professor Richard Marggraf Turley.

Contact

Email: rcm@aber.ac.uk
Office: C14
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622531
Personal Web Site: http://richardmarggrafturley.weebly.com/blog.html

Teaching Areas

Dr Richard Marggraf Turley teaches across both of the department's degree schemes, offering modules in English Literature and Creative Writing. His English Literature option modules currently include EN38320: Romantic Eroticism, and ENM2540: Romanticism's Radical Cultures. On the Creative Writing programme, he currently teaches WR20120: Writer's Art 2. Richard also supervises PG Literary Studies dissertations and Creative Writing portfolios. He supervises PhD theses in Romantic and Victorian Literary culture (LS), and poetry (CW).

Research

Poet and literary critic, Richard has research interests in Romantic literary and political culture, Shakespeare and food security, and contemporary poetry. He is the winner of the 2007 "Keats-Shelley Prize" for poetry, and he won the 2010 Wales Book of the Year "People's Choice" for his third collection, "Wan Hu's Flying Chair" (Salt, 2009). He has been involved in several collaborative projects between the arts and sciences, and is a regular guest on BBC arts and culture programmes.

Additional Interests

Centre for Romantic Studies

Richard Marggraf Turley is co-founder and Co-Director of the Centre for Romantic Studies – the first of its kind in Wales – based in the English Department at Aberystwyth. (Website currently being developed.) The Centre addresses an international community of scholars and teachers. It fulfils an important role in providing a focal point for research, teaching, funding, conferences and formal institutional exchange in Wales. Recent Centre for Romantic Studies events have included the 5-day international conference, Romanticism, History, Historicism (Plenary speakers: Professors Marjorie Levinson, Alan Bewell, Tom Paulin, Alan Liu, Anne Mellor, Susan Wolfson, Nicholas Roe). The conference in 2006 was entitled: Romanticism, Environment, Crisis.

 

See Richard's blog:  http://richardmarggrafturley.weebly.com/blog.html

Follow Richard on Twitter:  @RMarggrafTurley

Staff Publications

Single-Authored Monographs:

(Click on the covers for further information)

 

Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009)

 "Around his discovery that Cornwall was the author of an unsigned Edinburgh Magazine review, Richard Marggraf Turley has assembled a minutely documented and splendidly suggestive study of these writers’ interactions in the poetic marketplace . . . Marggraf Turley intriguingly and persuasively argues that Procter may have had some degree of access to Keats’s unpublished poetry in manuscript via the extended Hunt circle . . . Richard Marggraf Turley writes beautifully about the cross-currents of impatience and appreciation in Keats’s estimate of Cornwall."  Lead review, Times Literary Supplement, 22 September 2010. Reviewed by Oliver Herford (Lincoln College, Oxford).

“It should be added that from start to finish Marggraf Turley’s writing style makes Bright Stars a romp to read, as one might expect from a critic who has recently published three volumes of poetry. So many felicities …”.  Reviewed in Nineteenth Century Literature, 65 (2010), pp. 395-98, by Professor Christine Gallant (Georgia State University)

Keats’s Boyish Imagination (London: Routledge, 2004). Inaugural monograph in the ‘Routledge Studies in Romanticism’ series.

Reviews:
Romantic Circles (June 2010) by Jonathan Mulrooney: “Provocative and engaging … Marggraf Turley’s meticulous attention to the poems’ language yields remarkable insights into how the Keats lyric responded to the vicissitudes of the historical moment … Virtuoso close reading … The book as a whole vividly shows how criticism … can continue to challenge our scholarly commonplaces, enriching our understanding of the poetry.”
Stephen Hebron, Keats-Shelley Journal, 56 (2007): 'Unexpected and thought-provoking , , , structured around close, intelligent readings of individual poems . . . Such intellectual inventiveness is surely in keeping with Keats's own vital, humorous, and fretful mind'.
Times Literary Supplement, 24 December 2004 by Oliver Herford: 'Excitable, irresponsible criticism'
British Association for Romantic Studies, Bulletin & Review, 26 (September 2004) by Professor Andrew Bennett (University of Bristol): ‘[Keats’s Boyish Imagination] places itself firmly within an eminent critical tradition . . . a worthy successor to an important if edgy tradition of Keats criticism and one for which there is no higher praise than to say that it allows one to read Keats, to reread him, in ways that seem new but that also, once we’ve seen it, once we’ve seen what Marggraf Turley is getting at, seem to be just what we might have been thinking about Keats all along’.

 

The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Reviewed in Notes & Queries, n.s. 51 (June 2004) by Professor Donald S. Hair (University of Western Ontario): ‘No one who wants to read Romantic and early Victorian poems with a full understanding of their language can afford to ignore this book’.
Reviewed in Prose Studies, 28 (April 2006), pp. 103-7 by Dan Kline (Ohio State University): ‘eminently readable . . . the material is presented in a direct and lucid way that brings it to life and gives it a pressing and, one might say, exciting relevance . . . The arrival of Marggraf Turley’s study is an exciting development and promises to be a reliable and oft-turned-to companion’.

 

Poetry Books

 

Long-listed for the 2010 Wales Book of the Year, Richard's collection, 'Wan-Hu's Flying Chair', Salt, March 2009. See: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844714438.htm.  'Don’t miss Richard Marggraf Turley’s impressive Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair published by that champion of innovative verse, Salt. “Since you ask how it begins, it begins with elasticity”. Marggraf-Turley’s poetry bends and stretches. “When it works you almost don’t need walls.” I’d go along with that.' Peter Finch, Western Mail, 25 April 2009. 


  
Whiteout, co-authored with Damian Walford Davies (Parthian: Cardigan, 2006)
“Well-observed, witty, sparely-written poems, satisfyingly visceral and unsentimental” (Alice Kavounas, Poetry Review)
‘Immediately striking, the care for language, the tastes and sounds of words’. (Niall Griffiths, Real Aberystwyth, Seren, 2008)






The Fossil-Box (Cinnamon, 2007)
Work from this collection has been included in the prestigious Forward Book of Poetry anthology.
"There’s a rare and intense musicality in The Fossil-Box. Richard Marggraf Turley demonstrates a real appreciation of the sonic possibilities of English, and the delicious rolling cadences, reflecting ‘the Seven’s soluble tithes’, of this book are to be relished”. (Robert Minhinnick)
“Excellent at making ‘sound-sense’ as well as ‘visual’ sense, brilliant at sensation . . . ingenuity with verbs is his trademark” (Chris Kinsey, New Welsh Review)
“Splendid mix of personal and communal history . . . extraordinary range of vocabulary” (Owain Wilkins, Poetry Wales)
“There’s little doubt that Marggraf Turley has a perfect ear. Every word counts, imported for both sound and sense” (Kenneth Steven, Planet)
“A master wordsmith” (Nigel Humphreys, Envoi)

 

Edited Books

 

Forthcoming Autumn 2011 and available for pre-order from the publisher: The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011).

  
The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature, co-ed. with Damian Walford Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006).

   
Text Books  

 
Writing Essays: A Guide for Students in English and the Humanities (London: Routledge, 2000)

Reviewed in Mantex (2001) by Roy Johnson: ‘Lively and comprehensive essay-writing manual which is obviously based on solid experience of helping students to improve their skills’. 

Selected Articles

 ‘The Autumn King: Remembering the Land in King Lear’. Co-authored with Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Howard Thomas. Shakespeare Survey. (Forthcoming)

 

 

‘A Tragedy of Idle Weeds’, co-authored with Howard Thomas and Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Times Literary Supplement, 17 February 2010, pp. 14-15.

 

 

‘Evolution, Physiology and Phytochemistry of the Psychotoxic Arable Mimic Weed Darnel (Lolium Temulentum L)’, co-authored with Howard Thomas and Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Progress in Botany, 72, ed. U. Lüttge et al (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011), pp. 73-104.

 

 

‘In the Temple of Fame: Barry Cornwall and Keats’s Reputation’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 September 2008, pp. 13-15. Online version available at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4666844.ece

‘Slippery Steps of the Temple of Fame’: “Barry Cornwall” and Keats’s Reputation’. Keats-Shelley Review. Expanded version of TLS essay; forthcoming 2008.

'''Breathing Human Passion'': Cornwall, Keats, Shelley and Popular Romanticism', European Romantic Review, 19 (2008), pp. 253-73.

'Keats, Cornwall and the "Scent of Strong-Smelling Phrases"'. Romanticism, 12.ii (2007), pp. 102-14.

‘Johnny’s in the Basement: Keats, Bob Dylan and Influence’, in The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature, co-ed. with Damian Walford Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006).

‘Bright Stars and Bosom-Friends: John Keats and Barry Cornwall', Notes and Queries, n.s. 52. (December 2005), pp. 464-66.

“Amorous Cavaliers”: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Francis Jeffrey’, Notes and Queries. n.s. 52 (March 2005), pp. 48-50.

‘“Strange Longings”: Keats and Feet’, Studies in Romanticism, 41 (2002), 89-106.

‘“Full-grown lambs”: Keats, Immaturity and “To Autumn”’, Romanticism on the Net, 28 (November 2002).

‘John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Leigh Hunt’s Literary Pocket-Book’, Romanticism (2001), 163-76.

‘Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik by English-speaking Audiences’, German Life and Letters, 54 (2001), 234-52.

‘An Echo of Clarke’s Address in Shelley’s Defence’, Neophilologus, 84 (2000), 323-7.

‘“Knowledge of their own supremacy”: Oenone and the Standardization of Tennyson’s Diction’, Victorian Poetry, 37 (1999), 291-308.

‘Indolent Minds, Indolent Men, and “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”’, The Review of English Studies, 50 (1999), 204-7.

‘Handy Squirrels and Chapman’s Homer: Hunt, Keats and Romantic Philology’, Romanticism, 4.i (1998), 104-19.

‘Tennyson and the Nineteenth-Century Language Debate’, Leeds Studies in English, 28 (1997), 123-40.

‘Misrepresentation in Hensleigh Wedgwood’s Review of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik’, Notes & Queries, n.s. 41 (1994), 310-12.

Poetry

Richard Marggraf Turley won First Prize in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2007. Richard's first solo collection, The Fossil-Box, was published by Cinnamon in 2007. Whiteout, a volume co-authored with Damian Walford Davies, appeared with Parthian in 2006. Richard's poems have appeared in journals and magazines including Agenda, Stand, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Orbis, The Wolf, Poetry and Audience, and Planet, and as podcasts for the Telegraph. Recent radio interviews include an appearance on Radio 3's The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan. Robert Minhinnick has praised the 'rare and intense musicality' of Richard's work, while John Barnie notes the poetry's exploration of a 'complex tracery that involves our lives with the natural world'.  Recent radio interviews include appearances on Radio 3's The Verb.

To read Richard's Keats-Shelley Prize poem, 'Elisions' at the Telegraph's website:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3668962/Elisions-by-Richard-Marggraf-Turley.html

To read a BBC interview with Richard about his poetry:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/mid/sites/bookshelf/pages/margraff_turley.shtml

Other

‘Cambrian Readjustments: An Interview with Geoffrey Hill’. Co-authored with Damian Walford Davies, Poetry Wales, 46 (2010), pp. 10-13.

 

 

2000-word profile on ‘Bob Dylan’ for The Literary Encyclopaedia (www.LiteraryEncyclopedia.com). Forthcoming Summer 2005.