Dr Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe
Tutorial Fellow in French & Prevent Lead
Faculty Lecturer in French
Katherine received her undergraduate and graduate education at Hertford College, Oxford. Following a period as Junior Research Fellow and then British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Katherine returned to Hertford in 2005 to take up a fellowship.
Undergraduate teaching
Katherine teaches all papers on the first-year French course. At second and fourth-year levels, she teaches papers on French/English translation (II), Modern French literature (VIII, XI), and Special Subjects (XII) on Romanticism, late nineteenth-century poetry, and literature and the visual arts.
Graduate teaching
Katherine teaches the M.St. Special Subject in nineteenth-century poetry, and supervises research students in the general field of nineteenth-century French literature.
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Research interests
Katherine’s main research interests are in the field of nineteenth-century poetry. She has written a book on Corbière, an innovative poet of the 1870s, entitled Tristan Corbière and the Poetics of Irony, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Victor Hugo’s Poetry of Progress: Thinking Dynamism, which reads his vast body of Romantic verse as a visionary response to the temporal crisis triggered by the French Revolution. She studies how Hugo introduced a modern consciousness of time into poetry and how his striking depictions of historical change evolved over his lengthy career, both capturing the euphoria of the industrial age and presenting history as a disaster which resists rationalisation. More generally, Katherine is interested in what happens to ideas when they are incorporated into verse, in poetic metaphor, and in poetry by women, especially Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. She has been co-editor of the journal Cahiers Tristan Corbière and is a member of the Groupe Hugo.
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Related websites
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Publications
Books
Editor, with Richard Hibbitt, Tristan Corbière, Oysters, nightingales and cooking pots: selected poetry and prose in translation, translated by Christopher Pilling with an introduction by Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe (White Rose University Press, 2018).
Tristan Corbière and the Poetics of Irony, Oxford Modern Languages Monographs (Oxford: OUP, 2006).
Articles and Book Chapters
‘Decapitating God: Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Le Livre des Tables and Dieu’, Dix-neuf, Journal of the Society of Dix-neuviémistes, (2024), 82-94.
‘ “Le Satyre” and the Incorporation of Thought’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 48 (2019), 80-97.
‘Lyric and Memory: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “Tristesse” ’, French Forum, 42 (2017), 217-232.
‘Transformations in Victor Hugo’s Cosmic Poetry’, Dix-Neuf, 20 (2016), 278-90.
‘French Romantic Poetry’, in Handbook on European Romanticism, ed. by Paul Hamilton (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 122-139.
‘Humanity’s Struggle with Nature in Victor Hugo’s Poetry of Progress’, Modern Language Review, 107 (2012), 143-61.
‘Changing Constellations in Victor Hugo’s Contemplations’, in ‘When familiar meanings dissolve…’: Essays in French Studies in Memory of Malcolm Bowie, ed. by Naomi Segal and Gill Rye (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 83-96.
‘Progress as Idea and Image in Victor Hugo’s “Force des choses” ’, Dix-neuf, 13 (2009), 36-54.
‘Death and the Aesthetic of Continuity: Victor Hugo’s Les Contemplations’, French Studies, 62 (2008), 13-25.
‘ “Intérêt et Principal”: Nineteenth-Century Borrowings of La Fontaine’s “La cigale et la fourmi” ’, in Currencies: Fiscal Fortunes and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 89-100.
‘Paris as Bazaar: Tristan Corbière’s Poetry of the City’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 33 (2004), 120-34.
‘Voice-Defying Lyricism: Tristan Corbière’s “Les Amours jaunes” ’, French Studies, 56 (2002), 165-78.