Professor David Dwan
Tutorial Fellow in English, Fellow for Research & Harassment Advisor
Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History
David Dwan joined Hertford in 2014. Before this he held lectureships at Queen Mary (University of London), Queen’s University Belfast and the University of York.
Undergraduate teaching
At Hertford David teaches the first-year papers on literature from 1830 to 1910 and 1910 to the present, alongside FHS Paper 5. He also lectures in these areas for the English Faculty.
Graduate teaching
David contributes to the MSt on post-1900 literature and offers a course on the philosophical elements of modernism.
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Research interests
David’s work examines the links between literature and its wider intellectual history in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of The Good Life and Other Fictions (Princeton, 2027) – a study of the way literary fiction helps us to understand the broader role of fictiveness in our lives. He has also published widely on Orwell’s political thinking (Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (OUP, 2018) and edited Animal Farm for Oxford World Classics in 2021. His articles on literary-philosophical questions have appeared in a wide variety of journals: New Literary History, ELH, Philosophy and Literature, Textual Practice and the Journal of Modern Literature. He has a strong interest in Irish writing, and has produced several essays on W. B. Yeats and Edmund Burke in particular. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (2012) and the author of The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Field Day, 2008). He is currently completing What is that Noise? – an account of literary theory via The Waste Land.
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Publications
Books
- The Good Life and Other Fictions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2027)
- Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Co-Editor (with Chris Insole), The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
- The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field Day/Notre Dame, 2008)
Articles and book chapters
- ‘What was an Emotion? T. S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell,’ Modernism/Modernity, 33.1 (2026)
- ‘Philosophy and the Novel: Iris Murdoch’ in The British Novel of Ideas, ed. Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 322-338
- ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution’ in Oxford Handbook to W. B. Yeats, ed. Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell (Oxford University Press, 2023), 216-235
- ‘Unlucky Jim: Conrad, Chance, Ethics,’ Journal of Modern Literature, 46.1 (2022): 1-17
- ‘Orwell and Humanism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Nathan Waddell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64-78
- ‘The Prejudices of Enlightenment’ in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, ed. Moyra Haslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 91-109
- ‘Important Nonsense: Yeats and Symbolism’, New Literary History, 50.2 (2019): 219-43
- (with Emilie Morin), ‘Introduction’, International Yeats Studies: Yeats and Mass Communications, 3.1 (2018): 1-13
- ‘Romantic Nationalism: History and Illusion in Ireland,’ Modern Intellectual History, 14.3 (2017): 717-45
- ‘Young Ireland to Yeats’, The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (Princeton, 2016): 217-35
- ‘The Problem of Romanticism in Wyndham Lewis’, Essays in Criticism, 65.2 (2015): pp. 163-86
- ‘Modernism and Rousseau’, Textual Practice, 27.4 (2013): pp. 537-63
- ‘Orwell’s Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’, ELH, 79.3(2012): pp. 655-83
- ‘Burke and Utility’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 131-44
- (with Chris Insole) ‘Introduction: Philosophy in Action’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): pp. 1-15
- ‘Edmund Burke and the Emotions’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 72.4 (2011): pp. 571-93
- ‘Truth and Freedom in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Philosophy and Literature, 34.2 (2010): pp. 381-93
- ‘Yeats’s Thought’ in Visions and Revisions: W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010): pp. 109-26
- ‘Woolf, Scepticism and Manners’, Textual Practice, 22.2 (2008): pp. 249-68
- ‘Civic Virtue in the Modern World: The Politics of Young Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 22.1 (2007): pp. 35-60
- ‘Abstract Hatred: Yeats and the Counter-Revolutionary Paradigm’, Literature and History, 15.1 (2006): pp. 18-36
- ‘Young Ireland and the Horde of Benthamy’ in Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland, ed. Roger Swift and Christine Kinealy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006): pp. 109-18
- ‘Culture and Democracy in Ireland’, Irish Review, 32 (2004): pp. 23-38
- ‘That Ancient Sect: Yeats, Hegel, and the Possibility of Epic in Ireland’, Irish Studies Review, 12.2 (2004): pp. 201-11
- ‘Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger’, New Formations, 51 (2003): pp. 113-27
- ‘Yeats, Heidegger and the Problem of Modern Subjectivism’, Paragraph, 25.1 (2002): pp. 74-91