John Kerrigan (author)

John Kerrigan (born 1956) is Professor of English 2000, University of Cambridge.

Life and work

John Kerrigan was born in Liverpool; he was educated there at St. Edward's College followed by Oxford where he went to Keble later becoming a Junior Research Fellow at Merton.

Since 1982 he has taught at Cambridge where he is a fellow of St. John's College. He has lectured extensively in Europe, North and South America and Japan, and his publications on Shakespeare, early modern literature, and modern British and Irish poetry are internationally acclaimed.

During the 1980s Kerrigan established himself as one of a group of scholars who revolutionised the editing of Shakespeare by discrediting the practice of 'conflating' variant editions of such plays as "Hamlet" and "King Lear". His own editions include "Love's Labour's Lost" (1982) and Shakespeare's "Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint" (1986). He did further work on "A Lover's Complaint" recovering its sources and analogues in "Motives of Woe" (1991).

He won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 1998 for "Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon", an ambitious study in comparative literature, and in 2001 published a book of essays "On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature".

Over the last decade he has published extensively on contemporary poetry while exploring seventeenth-century anglophone literature in the context of British-Irish state formation. His "Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707" (2008) seeks to correct the traditional Anglocentric account of seventeenth-century English Literature by showing how much remarkable writing was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and how preoccupied such English authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell were with the often fraught interactions between ethnic, religious, and national groups around Britain and Ireland.

Selected Works

Books

*William Shakespeare, "Love's Labour's Lost", ed. John Kerrigan (1982)
*William Shakespeare, "Sonnets and a Lover's Complaint", ed. John Kerrigan (1986)
*John Kerrigan, "Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and Female Complaint" (1991)
*John Kerrigan, ed. with Michael Cordner and Peter Holland, "English Comedy" (1994)
*John Kerrigan, "Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon" (1996)
*John Kerrigan, ed. with Peter Robinson "The Thing about Roy Fisher" (2000)
*John Kerrigan, "On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays" (2001)
*John Kerrigan, "Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603-1707" (2008)

Articles and Book Chapters

Some of what can be found: 'The New Narrative', on contemporary poetry, "London Review of Books", 16 February 1984, 22-3;'Wordsworth and the Sonnet: Building, Dwelling, Thinking', "Essays in Criticism" 35 (1985), 45-75;'Ulster Ovids', in Neil Corcoran, ed., "The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland" (1991), 237-69;'A Complete History of Comic Noses', in Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan, eds, "English Comedy" (1994), 241-66;'Writing Numbers: Keats, Hopkins, and the History of Chance', in Nicholas Roe, ed., "Keats and History: Bicentenary Studies" (1995), 280-308;'Beyond Bardicide', on Shakespeare criticism, "TLS", 22 December 1995, 3-4 'Introduction' to Peter Robinson, ed., "Liverpool Accents: Seven Poets and a City" (1996), 1-7;'The Hidden Guilt in "The Ruined Cottage"', on Romanticism and moral philosophy, "TLS", 18 October 1996, 26;'When Eyesight is Fully Industrialized', on Paul Virilio and postmodernist science, "London Review of Books", 16 October 1997, 14-15;'Peter Reading's Collected Poems', "Thumbscrew" 9 (Winter 1997/8), 13-24;'Truman Capote and the Canon', "The Iowa Review" 28:3 (Winter 1998), 1-7;'Against Hybridism', on postcolonial criticism and cultural studies, "TLS", 21 August 1998, 8-9;'Earth Writing: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson', "Essays in Criticism" 48 (1998), 144-68;'Hidden Ireland: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Munster Poetry', "Critical Quarterly" 40:4 (1998), 76-100;'The Country of the Mind', on geography and literary studies, "TLS", 11 September 1998, 3-4;'Mrs Thatcher's Pearl', in Anna Torti and Piero Boitani, eds, "The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature" (1999), 181-99;'Hand and Foot', on Seamus Heaney and his critics, "London Review of Books", 27 May 1999, 20-3;'Divided Kingdoms and the Local Epic', "Yale Journal of Criticism" 13:1 (Spring, 2000), 3-21;'Going Scientific: Jeffrey Wainwright', "Metre" 9 (Spring, 2001), 34-40;'Shakespeare's Poems', in Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, eds, "The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies", 2nd edn (2001), 65-81;'Not so Poetically Conservative', on Derek Mahon and Michael Longley, "The Irish Review" 28 (Winter, 2001), 167-72'Touching and Being Touched', on theories of reading, "London Review of Books", 19 September 2002, 19-22'Paul Muldoon's Transits', "Jacket" 20 (2002), http://jacketmagazine.com, also in Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald, eds, "Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays" (2003), 125-49;'Notes from the Home Front: Contemporary British Poetry', "Essays in Criticism" 54 (2004), 103-27;'Old, Old, Old, Old, Old', review of R. F. Foster, "W. B. Yeats: A Life", vol. II, "London Review of Books", 3 March 2005, 7-10;'The Ticking Fear', review of Louis MacNeice, "Collected Poems", ed. Peter McDonald etc., "London Review of Books", 7 February 2008, 15-18.

External links

* [http://www.uiowa.edu/~fyi/issues/issues97-98/050898web/revenge_050898.html UIOWA Truman Capote Prize Report]
* [http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/archipelagic-english-by-john-kerrigan-798706.html Independent review of "Archipelagic English"]