Nigel Alderman

Assistant Professor of English

Specialization
Post-1945 British literature and culture, Modernism, Romanticism, and literary theory, especially Marxist aesthetics

Nigel Alderman specializes in twentieth-century British literature with a more general interest in romantic and post-romantic poetry and poetics. He is currently finishing a book, From Myth to History: Transitional Forms in English Literature of the 1960s, that examines the turn from myth construction to historiographic investigation in the works of Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Harold Pinter, Peter Brook, Geoffrey Hill, and Ted Hughes. Professor Alderman has also written on John Milton and memory, on William Wordsworth, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle and the professional imagination, on William Wordsworth's construction of a social self, on T. S. Eliot's quatrain poems (an essay which won the Andrew J. Kappel Annual Award for best article of literary criticism published in Twentieth Century Literature), on Philip Larkin and national allegory, and on the historicopoetics of 1960s British poetry. He co-edited Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism and he is currently co-editing, with C. D. Blanton, a forthcoming collection of essays on British and Irish poetry since 1945. Until May 2005, Professor Alderman taught at Yale University where he was awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities, the Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at Yale College, and a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship. He teaches both literature and theory courses that focus primarily on the twentieth century. In addition to being a member of the English department, he is also a member of Mount Holyoke's program in Critical Social Thought.

Selected Publications

"Myth, History, and The New Poetry." A Concise Companion to Post-War British and Irish Poetry. Eds. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

"'Unity Sublime': The Excursion's Social Self." Yale Journal of Criticism. 18. 1 (2005): 21-43.

"Introduction." Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism. Eds. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton. Special issue of Yale Journal of Criticism. 13.1 (2000): 1-2.

"'The Life With A Hole In It': Philip Larkin and the Condition of England." Textual Practice. 8.2 (1994): 279-301.

"'Where are the Eagles and Trumpets?': The Strange Case of Eliot's Missing Quatrains."
Twentieth Century Literature. 39.2 (1993): 129-151.