Douglas Kneale

English Language and Literature

Full Professor
PhD Toronto

Areas of Specialization

Douglas Kneale is the current Dean of Humanities at Brock. After completing his BA and MA at the University of Western Ontario and his PhD at the University of Toronto, he held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University and a Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship in Washington, D.C. before joining Western, where he taught for twenty-five years, including a term as Chair of the Department of English. He has held SSHRC Standard Research and Occasional Scholarly Conference grants, and has served widely as an external appraiser for departmental review, promotion and tenure, and manuscript assessments. He is a recipient of the Pleva Award, Western’s highest recognition for excellence in teaching, and he has served as national president of the Canadian Association of Chairs of English. His research interests include English Romanticism, literary history, critical theory, and language and rhetoric.

Selected Publications
Books
Monumental Writing: Aspects of Rhetoric in Wordsworth’s Poetry (1988)
Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (1999)
(ed.) The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman (1992).

Essays and reviews in PMLA, ELH, ELN, Studies in Romanticism, Ariel, English Studies in Canada, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Psychoanalytic Books, University of Toronto Quarterly, European Romantic Review, Journal of Contemporary Thought, Criticism, Review of English Studies, and elsewhere.

An essay on ekphrasis in the work of W.G. Sebald has just appeared in the volume Rewriting Texts, Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Brock colleagues Leslie Boldt, Corrado Federici, and Ernesto Virgulti. A recent essay on genre and catachresis in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road is scheduled to appear in a volume published by Routledge India on The Political Economy of Race, Gender, Class, and Caste (ed. A. JanMohamed and P. Kar). A chapter on the later Wordsworth’s itinerary poetry was published this June in the volume Romantic Localities (ed. C. Bode and J. Labbe), and a new essay on Milton, Wordsworth, and genre is forthcoming in Modern Philology. He is also in the process of collecting his thoughts for another book, tentatively entitled Common Humanities, that draws on his administrative experiences in relation to culture and the university today.