This Plenary Lecture by Professor Ralph Pite (University of Bristol) is to mark the launch of the new School of Humanities at the University of Reading and is in support of the English Creates Campaign for the English Degree.
Ralph Pite is a Professor of Literature and the Romantic period at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on three key areas: the Romantic period (particularly on the impact of Dante’s writing at the time and on the lives and self-fashioning of Romantic poets); Victorian literature (especially the works and life of Thomas Hardy, ideas of place in the period, life-writing, and Italian literature’s presence in English culture); and post-war British poetry.
His present research brings these three areas together by addressing questions of writing and the environment, particularly with reference to the first world war poet Edward Thomas, to Charlotte Mew, and to ideas of ‘the Simple Life’ and to the new landscapes of an endangered world.
