Nick Groom | |
---|---|
Born | 1966 (age 56–57) |
Nationality | British |
Academic background | |
Education | Bedford Modern School |
Alma mater | Hertford College, Oxford |
Thesis | Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Its Context, Presentation, and Reception |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English Literature |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions |
Nicholas Michael Groom FRSA (born 1966) is Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau, an author on subjects ranging from the history of the Union Jack, [1] [2] to Thomas Chatterton, [3] [4] has edited several books and regularly appears on television, radio and at literary festivals as an authority on English Literature, seasonal customs, J. R. R. Tolkien, the 'Gothic' and 'British' and 'English' identities. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Due to his extensive work on the Gothic, especially on the history of vampires, he has become known as the 'Prof of Goth' in the media and has written several articles on the Goth scene, including essays on the singer, Nick Cave.
Nick Groom was born in 1966 and educated at Bedford Modern School [10] and Hertford College, Oxford where he graduated with first class honours in 1988. [5] He was awarded a DPhil (Oxon) in 1994 with his doctoral thesis, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Its Context, Presentation, and Reception. [5] [11]
Groom became a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter in 1994, a Senior Lecturer in Post-Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol in 2000 and Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol in 2003. [5] In April 2000 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Stanford University following which he was made Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago in October 2001. [5]
In 2007 Groom was made Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter and established the Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place and Sustainability in 2008. [5] He is on the management board of the Atlantic Archipelagos Research Consortium and the Wellcome Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health.
Groom teaches courses on the Gothic. He also used to teach what was then the only undergraduate course in Britain on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Groom’s research has ‘largely focussed on three areas; cultural formation and authenticity, including attribution studies (work on forgery and, specifically, Chatterton); national identity (Englishness and Britishness, including the Gothic); and historicist popular culture and folklore (seasons and saints’ days)’. [5] He has recently concentrated particularly on Gothic literature. His book The Seasons was shortlisted for the Katherine Briggs Folklore Prize and was runner-up for BBC Countryfile Book of the Year 2014.
Groom wrote an essay on The Young Ones for The Cassell Book of Great British Comedy and in 2008 he nominated Rik Mayall for an Honorary Degree at the University of Exeter. [12] Following Mayall’s death in 2014, Groom was regularly interviewed to comment on Mayall’s unique contribution to English comedy.
Groom is a critically acclaimed author, has edited several books including four Gothic novels for Oxford University Press and a twelve volume edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (London and Bristol: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), [13] has contributed over seventy chapters and articles to edited collections and academic journals [5] and has regularly reviewed books for The Financial Times , Times Higher Education and The Independent . [5] He is currently a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement . His online essay "Let's discuss over country supper soon" [14] was used for 'Creating a Countryside', the 2017 exhibition at Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park.
Groom lives on Dartmoor. He has a flock of sheep and is actively involved in local arts and music.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Alfred Leslie Rowse was a British historian and writer, best known for his work on Elizabethan England and books relating to Cornwall.
Thomas Chatterton was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".
John Haffenden is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Sheffield.
Sir Andrew Jonathan Bate, CBE, FBA, FRSL, is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, scholar, and occasional novelist, playwright and poet. He specializes in Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is Regents Professor of Literature and Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities in a joint appointment of the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Sustainability and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College in the University of Oxford, where he holds the title of Professor of English Literature. Bate was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, from 2011 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019 he was Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in the City of London. He was knighted in 2015 for services to literary scholarship and higher education. He is also Chair of the Hawthornden Foundation.
Sir Israel Gollancz, FBA was a scholar of early English literature and of Shakespeare. He was Professor of English Language and Literature at King's College, London, from 1903 to 1930.
Joseph Wright FBA was an English Germanic philologist who rose from humble origins to become Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford.
George Stuart Gordon was a British literary scholar.
Henry Benjamin Wheatley FSA was a British author, editor, and indexer. His London Past and Present was described as his most important work and "the standard dictionary of London."
Jonathan Fletcher Wordsworth was an English academic, literary critic and expert on the Romantic era in literature.
Philip Schwyzer is an American-British literary scholar and author, who since 2001 has been Professor of Renaissance Literature at Exeter University.
The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology is a scholarly study of the Middle-earth works of J. R. R. Tolkien written by Tom Shippey and first published in 1982. The book discusses Tolkien's philology, and then examines in turn the origins of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and his minor works. An appendix discusses Tolkien's many sources. Two further editions extended and updated the work, including a discussion of Peter Jackson's film version of The Lord of the Rings.
Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien is a 2014 book edited by Stuart D. Lee and published by Wiley-Blackwell. It is a part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature series, which have been described as prestigious reference works, and features authors well-known in the field of Tolkien studies.
John Garth is a British journalist and author, known especially for writings about J. R. R. Tolkien including his biography Tolkien and the Great War and a book on the places that inspired Middle-earth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. He won a 2004 Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship for his work on Tolkien. The biography influenced much Tolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades.
Stuart Dermot Lee is a British specialist in information technology at Oxford University Computing Services and a Reader in E-learning at Oxford University, but is best known for his scholarly books on J. R. R. Tolkien. He is also an award winning playwright.
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Scott's novels are also frequently described as historical romances, and Northrop Frye suggested "the general principle that most 'historical novels' are romances". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
The non-narrative elements in The Lord of the Rings are the structures present in J. R. R. Tolkien's novel other than narrative text, including artwork, calligraphy, chronologies, family trees, heraldry, languages, maps, poetry, proverbs, scripts, and a mass of paratextual materials such as glossaries, prologues, and annotations in philological style, some of them supporting a found manuscript conceit. Many of these are interspersed in the main text; others are collected in the extensive appendices. Scholars have commented that the use of these elements places Tolkien in the tradition of English antiquarianism. Other scholars have discussed their functions, in particular making the secondary world of Middle-earth seem real and solid, encouraging suspension of disbelief.