Current Research
My major research areas are the relationships between European and Spanish Romanticism, especially the impact of Lord Byron, and the literature, philosophy and the arts of the period 1880-1914 in Spain. Present work is divided between studies of Byron and a reassessment of fin de siglo writing where I question the widely held notion of two supposedly antagonistic movements - modernismo and noventayochismo - to demonstrate that a specific set of philosophical and aesthetic ideals informed the thinking of most of the new generation of writers. An analysis of the emergence of the Symbolist-Decadent aesthetic and its relationship to theories of degeneration, to medicine and esoteric religions will accompany the above. I am presently editing two collections: Antonio Machado's Soledades, galerías, otros poemas and Manuel Machado's Alma and El mal poema. In 2003 I was invited to edit The Reception of Lord Byron in Europe, 2 vols, London-New York, Thoemmes-Continuum, published in 2005 for which I received the Emma Dangerfield Award for Scholarship on Lord Byron. In 2005 I contributed 3 edited collections of Juan Ramón Jiménez (1 reconstructed from manuscripts and notes) for the centenary Obra poética (Espasa-Calpe). I have lectured internationally in Denmark, France, Germany, the Republic of Georgia, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and the United States. I was Visiting Professor in the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore and the University of Colorado at Boulder and am a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras of Seville.
Recent publications
'¿Poeta torremarfileño o poeta realista? (Memoria y realidad en Platero y yo), in Juan Ramón Jiménez. Poesía y pensamiento, ed. Luis Miguel Arroyo Arrayás, Universidad de Huelva Publicaciones / Diputación de Huelva, 2008, pp.173-198.
'Juan Ramón Jiménez y la tradición pastoral: la búsqueda de una edad dorada', in Darío a diario. Rubén y el modernismo en dos orillas, coordinador Ángel Esteban, Granada, Universidad de Granada, 2007, pp.373-400.
'Lord Byron's Gothic Footprint in Spain: José de Espronceda and the Re-making of Horror', in The Gothic Byron, ed. Peter Cochran, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp.129-44.
'"Amo más que la Grecia de los griegos / la Grecia de la Francia'. Ancient Greece in the Spanish Lyric (1870-1910), Studi Ispanici, XXXIV, 2009, 95-111.
'Introduction to Spanish Romanticism', in Stephen Prickett, European Romanticism: A Reader, London-New York, Continuum, 2010, pp. 57-8, 261-62, 397-414, 549-60, 641-44, 961-64, 1007-08.