He graduated in English at Keble College, Oxford, where he was a graduate student. He was a Junior Research Fellow, St John's College, Oxford. He taught English Literature from the Elizabethans to the present day as Fellow and Tutor of Corpus, serving the College variously as Dean, Senior Tutor, Tutor for Admissions, Vice-President, and finally Senior Research Fellow in English Literature. He gave University lectures on English Literature, Literary History and Literary Theory. He held a Personal Professorship in English Language and Literature. He was variously a Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA; at Konstanz, Germany ; at Freiburg and Goettingen, Germany. He was Scholar in Residence, University of Perth, Western Australia. He is a Fellow of the Grossbritannien Zentrum, Humboldt University, Berlin, and Honorary Professor of the University of Bucharest. He has lectured at many universities in the UK and around the world - Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Cyprus, Romania, Croatia, India, Brazil, Chile, Australia, Ghana, the USA, Canada. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to scholarship and the understanding of the humanities. He has broadcast frequently for BBC radio, contributing to arts programmes, scripting and presenting features, on literary, musical and cultural-historical topics. He has reviewed widely in newspapers, journals and magazines. He has been a judge for many literary prizes: The Booker, 1992 and 1998; The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, 2001-2002; The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2015; The DSC Asian Fiction Prize 2017.
Publications
Monographs: Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. British Writers of the Thirties. In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts and History. Reading After Theory. Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics. King Lear, The Connell Guide. Editions: The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse. Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War. Cinco Escritores Britanicos/Five British Writers. George Eliot, Adam Bede. The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics. Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader. Introductions: Ralph Bates, The Olive Field, i-viii. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed Jeanette Winterson & Margaret Reynolds, xv-xxiii. Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man, vii-xiv. Postface, Charles Morgan, Le Passage, 273-282. The Book of Psalms, ix-xvii. Scores of articles on fiction, theory, emotionality, textuality, the thirties, politics, music, the Bible, religion and literature. A small, and hopefully typical, handful will stand for the rest: 'Readers Beside themselves: Particular Pleasures and Generic Controls', Representations of Emotions, ed J Schlaeger & G Stedman, 43-56. 'Anthony Trollope and Law, Laws, legalisms and Assorted Legislations', REAL, 18, Law and Literature, ed Brook Thomas, 89-107. 'Having a Clue... about Ovid', Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Vol 5, ed Ruediger Ahrens. 102-124. 'Why Ekphrasis?'. Classical Philology, special issue, ed Shadi Bartsch & Jas Elsner, 102, 1, 57-71. 'Poubellication: in the lexical dunny with the furphy king from down under', Rude Britannia, ed Mina Gorji, 35-55. 'Bible Reading and/after theory', The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible, ed Michael Lieb, Emma Mason & Jonathan Roberts, 649-673. 'Marxist Cricket? Some Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of the Thirties', Ecology and the Literature of the British Left, The Red and the Green, ed John Rignall & Gustav Klaus, with Valentine Cunningham, 177-191. 'The Terrors of Madness and Victorian Literary Nosology', Hermeneutics of Textual Madness: Re-Readings of Textual Madness/ Hermeneutiques de la Folie Textuelle: Re-Lectures, ed MJ Muratore, I, 389-419. 'Bunyan's Way of Reading', Essays in Criticism, 64, 2017, 323-354.
