Jonathon Shears

What is a hangover? How does it feel to suffer from one? What can hangovers tell us about the way attitudes to alcohol have developed over time? In the humanities, why have we neglected the subject of the hangover in our critical discussions of alcohol and intoxication?In the first comprehensive study of the hangover in literature and culture, Jonathon Shears sets out to answer each of these questions by exploring the representation of ‘the morning after’ in a wide variety of texts ranging from the Renaissance to the present day. The book looks at what examples of ‘hangover literature’ from writers such as Ben Jonson, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, Kingsley Amis and A.L. Kennedy can add to our personal and cultural understanding of alcohol use. It demonstrates that, more than just a cluster of physical symptoms, the hangover is a complex interplay of sensations and emotions with a fascinating cultural history.

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost offers a new critical insight into the relationship between Milton and the Romantic poets. Beginning with a discussion of the role that seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers like Dryden, Johnson and Burke played in formulating the political and spiritual mythology that grew up around Milton, Shears devotes a chapter to each of the major Romantic poets, contextualizing their 'misreadings' of Milton within a range of historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts and discourses. By tackling the vexed issue of whether Paradise Lost by its nature makes available and encourages alternate readings or whether misreadings are imposed on the poem from without, Shears argues that the Romantic inclination towards fragmentation and a polysemous aesthetic leads to disrupted readings of Paradise Lost that obscure the theme, or warp the 'grain', of the poem. Shears concludes by examining the ways in which the legacy of Romantic misreading continues to shape critical responses to Milton's epic.

Reading, writing and the influence of Harold Bloom takes the work of the world’s best-known living literary critic and discovers what it is like to read ‘with’, ‘against’ and ‘beyond’ his ideas. The editors, Alan Rawes and Jonathon Shears, introduce the collection by assessing the impact of Bloom’s brand of agonistic criticism on literary critics and its ongoing relevance to a discipline attempting to redefine and settle on its collective goals. Firmly grounded in, though not confined to, Bloom’s first specialism of Romantic Studies, the volume contains essays that examine Bloom’s debts to high Romanticism, his quarrels with feminism, his resistance to historicism, the tensions with the ‘Yale School’ and his recent work on Shakespeare and genius. Crucially, chapters are also devoted to putting Bloom’s anxiety-themed ratios into practice on the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and D. H. Lawrence, amongst others. The Harold Bloom that emerges from this collection is by turns divisive and unifying, marginalised and central, radical and conservative.

The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost offers a new critical insight into the relationship between Milton and the Romantic poets. Beginning with a discussion of the role that seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers like Dryden, Johnson and Burke played in formulating the political and spiritual mythology that grew up around Milton, Shears devotes a chapter to each of the major Romantic poets, contextualizing their 'misreadings' of Milton within a range of historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts and discourses. By tackling the vexed issue of whether Paradise Lost by its nature makes available and encourages alternate readings or whether misreadings are imposed on the poem from without, Shears argues that the Romantic inclination towards fragmentation and a polysemous aesthetic leads to disrupted readings of Paradise Lost that obscure the theme, or warp the 'grain', of the poem. Shears concludes by examining the ways in which the legacy of Romantic misreading continues to shape critical responses to Milton's epic.