Today we asked Jerrold Hogle, of the University of Arizona, "What are you working on?"

I am presently working on a book-project currently titled The Gothic Image In The Romantic Poem, towards which I launched initial forays (bringing forth useful suggestions from colleagues) at the 2001 and 2002 NASSR and the 2003 International Gothic Association Conferences. This effort tries to bring together at last the two main tracks in my research, Romantic poetry and the whole "Gothic" phenomenon. Building on the good work of Michael Gamer, Anne Williams, David Punter, and others, I hope to offer an informative new take on the complex "baggage" that the Gothic brings to Romantic poems when it is used there (often with some disparagement). What is brought out in that "baggage," I am starting to find, varies greatly from author to author, and at this point I plan to treat Smith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robinson, Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats, along with others. In all cases, though, I am finding so far that the most irresolvable parts of each writer's own struggles between ideologies in the culture at the time are "thrown off" into the Gothic because it is in the very nature of the Gothic to provide that sort of "abject" symbolic location. I will be grateful for any and all suggestions as I proceed.

Jerry Hogle
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~hogle/