Prof Melissa Fegan | University of Chester

Professor of Irish and Victorian Literature

Melissa Fegan is Professor of Irish and Victorian Literature, and Senior Postgraduate Research Tutor for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. She is also Programme Leader for the MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Professor Fegan teaches on the BA English Literature, BA English Language and Literature, and MA Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture programmes. Her teaching largely focuses on literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, and she supervises undergraduate dissertations on a wide range of issues. She supervises PhD students working on nineteenth-century literature, Irish literature, Neo-Victorian literature and historical fiction.

Professor Fegan has published widely on literary representations and cultural memory of the Great Famine in Ireland, and on nineteenth-century Irish literature more broadly. She is currently working on the Famine in post-independence Irish literature, the hotel in Irish fiction, and nationalism in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lady Wilde.

Books

Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (Clarendon Press, 2002).
Wuthering Heights: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008).

Editions

‘Introduction’, Emily Brontë, Cumbres Borrascosas [Spanish academic edition of Wuthering Heights] (Editorial Vicens Vives, 2018).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

‘Young Ireland and Beyond’, in Matthew Campbell (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition 1830–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 38-57.

‘The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015’, in Liam Harte (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 407-423.

‘How the Other Three-Quarters Lived: The Cabin in Famine Literature’, in Marguérite Corporaal and Peter Gray (eds), The Great Famine and Social Class: Conflicts, Responsibilities, Representations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 29-50.

‘“This Most Humane Commerce”: Lacemaking during the Famine’, in Marguérite Corporaal, Oona Frawley, and Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (eds), The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures (Liverpool University Press, 2018), 110-127.

‘The Moral Economy of the Irish Hotel from the Union to the Famine’, in Susanne Schmid and Monika Elbert (eds) Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing (Routledge, 2017)

‘“Of every land the guest”: Aubrey de Vere’s travels’, Studies in Travel Writing, 20:2 (2016), 135-148.

‘“The Tottering, Fluttering, Palpitating Mass”: Power, Hunger and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Literary Responses to the Great Famine’, in Enda Delaney and Breandán Mac Suibhne (eds) Ireland’s Great Famine and Popular Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 34-58.

‘Waking the Bones: the Famine in Contemporary Irish Literature’, in Ruud van den Beuken, Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Lindsay Janssen (eds) Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine (Peter Lang, 2014), 157-174.

‘“Every Irishman is an Arab”: James Clarence Mangan’s Eastern “Translations”’, Translation and Literature, 22:2 (Summer 2013), 195-214.

‘William Carleton and Famine’, William Carleton Summer School, August 2012http://www.williamcarletonsociety.org/site/talks/talksunderconstruction.html

"That heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds”: Famine and Family in Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea’, in Neo-Victorian Families, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Rodopi, 2011).

‘The Great Famine in Literature, 1845-1896', in Julia M. Wright (ed.), A Companion to Irish Literature, vol. 1 (Blackwell, 2010).

‘“Like a wail from the tomb, / But of world-waking power”: James Clarence Mangan's "A Vision: A. D. 1848", The Great Famine and the Young Ireland Rising', in 1848: The Year the World Turned?, eds. Kay Boardman and Christine Kinealy (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

‘“Something so utterly unprecedented in the annals of human life”: William Carleton and the Great Famine’, in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria's Ireland?: Ireland and Britishness, 1837-1901(Four Courts Press, 2004).

"Isn't it your own country?”: The Stranger in Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature’, Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), 31-45.

‘The Traveller's Experience of Famine Ireland’, Irish Studies Review, 9:3 (2001), 361-71.

BA
MSt
DPhil
PGC Learning and Teaching (HE)
FHEA