Brian McGrath
Professor
Contact
Department of English
Office: 607 Strode
Phone: (864) 656-3151
Email: mcgrath@clemson.edu
Education
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Emory University; M.A. English, University of Maine; B.A. English, Northwestern University
Brian McGrath is a specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature and philosophy. At Clemson he regularly teaches courses in romanticism, the history of poetry and poetics, and aesthetic, literary, and rhetorical theory. He is the author of two monographs, Look Round for Poetry: Untimely Romanticisms (Fordham University Press, 2022) and The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy (Northwestern University Press, 2013). He is currently at work on a new book about the poetics of hedging (literal hedges and rhetorical acts of hesitation). With Sara Guyer, he co-edits the Lit Z book series published by Fordham University Press. With Orrin N. C. Wang, he co-edits the Romantic Circles: Praxis Series journal.
Selected Professional Works
Books (Published)
Look Round for Poetry: Untimely Romanticisms. Fordham University Press, 2022.
The Poetics of Unremembered Acts: Reading, Lyric, Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press 2013.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters (Published)
“Seeing into the very Bones: C. L. R. James and William Wordsworth on Figure, Personhood, and Revolutionary Discourse,” in Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution, edited by Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White (Bloomsbury, 2021): 95-116.
“A Cell in Waiting: Reading the Death Penalty Seminars, At Dawn,” Poetics Today 42.1 (March 2021): 85-102.
"Impassivities: From Paradise Lost to Hellas," Comparative Literature 72.2 (Summer 2020): 114-127.
“Determination in the Passive Voice (Wordsworth and Williams),” in Raymond Williams and Romanticism, edited by Jon Klancher and Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2020).
"Shelley, Among other Things," MLN 133.5 (December 2018): 1188-1205.
"Understating Poetry," New Literary History 49.3 (Summer 2018): 289-308.
"Dead Men Running," diacritics 42.4 (2014): 80-97.
"For Geoffrey Hartman," Philological Quarterly 93.2 (Spring 2014): 201-203.
“Keats for Beginners,” Studies in Romanticism 50 (Summer 2011): 349-370.
