Professor Guy Cuthbertson
ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES
English
0151 291 3506
cuthbeg@hope.ac.uk
I am a Professor of British Literature and Culture. I mostly work on the literature of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the Edwardian era, the First World War, and the 1920s, and I have published widely on Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). I also work on D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930). I am interested in many things, including the First World War, and a wide range of literature; but as a researcher I've been especially interested in a number of related themes, including 'Back to the Land' movements, the simple life, the natural world, environmentalism, ideas of 'home', and, indeed, joy, hope and celebration. A key theme of my work tends to be writers' preference for the countryside rather than the city, and a literary scepticism about modern life and technology. Rebels, poets, soldiers and outsiders are always interesting, but so too are folk culture, old buildings and the countryside. I gave the British Academy's Chatterton Lecture on Poetry in 2018, on Edward Thomas, later published as '"I should want nothing more": Edward Thomas and Simplicity', The Journal of the British Academy (2019). My inaugural professorial lecture at Hope was on the simple life and the return to nature.
I've written two books for Yale University Press - Wilfred Owen (2014) and Peace at Last (2018). Both were widely reviewed and led to a variety of media appearances. I'm currently writing a third book for Yale, on D.H. Lawrence. I've also edited two scholarly editions of Edward Thomas's prose for Oxford University Press and I'm now editing a third. I am a General Editor of the series 'Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Scholarly Edition'. I studied at St Andrews (MA first class) and Oxford (MPhil and DPhil): my doctorate is from Oxford, and at St Andrews I won the Class Medal and the dissertation prize. After teaching at Oxford and St Andrews for several years, and after a year in London, I came to Liverpool Hope in 2012.
Please also see guycuthbertson.com where you can find plenty of information about my publications and interests, fellowships and my various media appearances, including national television and radio, and podcasts.
Teaching Specialisms:
Writing Home: World War and Class Conflict 1900-1945 (third-year English Literature)
Modern Nature: the natural environment and ten themes in modern and contemporary literature (third-year English Literature)
Modernism (third-year English Literature)
Major Authors: Edward Thomas (second-year English Literature)
The Literature of the First World War (MA History)
Rewriting the North (MA English Literature)
Various modern and contemporary literature topics for first-year English Literature
School/Faculty Roles:
2023-24:
Head of School and Subject Lead
Senate
University Research Committee
2024-25:
Level H coordinator English Literature
Recent Publications and Projects:
- Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day, 11 November 1918 (Yale University Press, 2018, pbk 2022), 300pp. And audiobook.
- ‘The Day the World Turned Upside Down’, BBC History Magazine (November 2018), Supplement: 24-page Armistice Magazine, pp. 4-9.
- ‘The Armistice bacchanal’, The New Statesman (4 November 2018), pp. 42-3.
- ‘Let us see to it that we guard the peace’, The Tablet (10 November 2018), pp. 4-5.
- ‘The Day of Victory: Gloucestershire and its Poets at the Armistice’, Dymock Poets and Friends (2019), pp. 101-4.
- ‘”I should want nothing more”: Edward Thomas and simplicity‘, Journal of the British Academy (November 2019), open access (reprinted in The Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, 83, January 2020).
- ‘Capturing Home: British First World War Poetry’, British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920: A New Age?, ed. James Purdon (Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 122-35.
- ‘“Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt”: Exploring Churchyards, Graves and Epitaphs with Edward Thomas’, Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, 87 (January 2022), pp. 26-8.
- ‘“That remoter, changeless England”: Walter de la Mare and Edward Thomas’, Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals, ed. Yui Kajita, Angela Leighton and A.J. Nickerson, Liverpool English Texts and Studies, 95 (Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 77-94.
- ‘Edward Thomas and the Mundays of East Meon’, Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, 89 (January 2023), pp. 16-21.
- ‘Edward Thomas (1878-1917)’, A History of World War One Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 350-64.
Media:
My many media appearances include
Television: BBC 1. Remembrance Sunday: The Cenotaph, 2018 – World War One Remembered. 11 November 2018. Presenter: David Dimbleby. (10am-1.30pm)
Television: BBC 1. Songs of Praise – Wilfred Owen interview, 4 November 2018.
Podcasts: Seven episodes of Shedunnit (BBC Sounds)
Radio and Podcast: BBC Radio 4 In Our Time, ‘Wilfred Owen’, 27 October 2022. (Also in an In Our Time anthology on Audible.)