“What Are You Reading?”: Andrew McInnes

The Communications Fellows are excited to continue the K-SAA Blog’s “What Are You Reading?” series! Started by the 2019 Comms Team, this series aims to spotlight the research of our community members and encourage conversation around recent publications in the field. Please reach out to us if you have someone you would like to see interviewed (including yourself)!

Andrew McInnes is Reader in Romanticisms at Edge Hill University, and Co-Director of EHU Nineteen, a research centre in nineteenth-century studies. He is widely published in Romantic Studies, women’s writing, gothic fiction, and children’s literature. From 2020-2022, he was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow on the project “The Romantic Ridiculous.” In 2024, he published Reading the Romantic Ridiculous with his former postdoctoral researcher and current co-author Rita Dashwood. He is currently working on a critical edition of the Brontë sisters’ first collaborative publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) for Broadview.

What new studies of Romantic-era literature are you reading right now?

I have just finished being on the panel of the British Association of Romantic Studies First Book Prize 2026 - winner announced at the end of July! The winner and honourable mentions share a preoccupation with racial politics and materialist aesthetics, and were all representative of current directions in Romantic Studies, working to recover the shaping significance of marginalised lives and unconsidered objects. I really enjoyed how each of the awardees started from autobiographical impulses, and also theorised the significance of the personal in their politically engaged writing. I want to shout out to a great book that just missed out on the winning shortlist: Mathelinda Nabugodi’s Shelley with Benjamin. It too combines personal testimony with political engagement to think about the relationship between Shelley and Benjamin’s philosophical projects, especially around translation and meaning-making. I thought it was a gripping creative-critical approach, which thought carefully about how both Shelley and Benjamin craft soundscapes to ground their philosophies in pleasurable and provocative ways.

Does this writing inform your current research and/or teaching?

I would have loved to have read Nabugodi’s work when we were writing Reading the Romantic Ridiculous, which also plays with the form of academic writing! I really enjoyed the ways she integrated her own life writing into the more academic discussion of Shelley and Benjamin’s preoccupation with names and naming. At the moment, though, I am working on the notes and appendices for my critical edition of the Brontë Poems, so am engaging with Brontë criticism which often straddles period boundaries between Romantic and Victorian Studies. Recently, I’ve really enjoyed Amanda Blake Davies’ chapter on Emily, Shelley, and sexual ambivalence in Kathryn Ready and David Sigler’s Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression - it’s really good on Emily’s longstanding interest in Shelley, bringing out both writers’ play with gender identity and how that queers their poetics.

What books are in your 'to read' pile right now? (Any period or genre!)

I’m just back from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Multiplatform 2026: Poetry in Games / Games in Poetry, where I was speaking about how the Brontë siblings’ teenage table top roleplaying continues to inform their collaborative poetry publication. As is usual with conferences, the event inspired a long “to read” wish list. At the top of it are Kieron Gillen’s Die, a comic book and role playing game in which Charlotte Brontë appears as a Dungeon Master of Glasstown. Abigail Parry performed a great keynote, ending with a poem inspired by chess - and a bad boyfriend! So, I also want to read her I Think We’re Alone Now.

Which book(s) do you most frequently recommend to those starting out in Romantic-era research? Why?

When I started my PhD, my supervisor recommended that I read James Chandler’s England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism as a model for how to write, and I remember reading it greedily on the train home from Exeter to Cornwall. I have definitely recommended this great work to my own students. It is scrupulously methodological, with deep and engaged close readings.

Not an example of Romantic Studies, but I also find myself regularly recommending Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Ngai’s theorisation of cuteness in particular is really engaging, for me and my students. She argues that the cute both demands protection from violence whilst also attracting it. One of my undergraduate students wrote a great essay I still think about on how Austen represents the homes of her protagonists as cute: places of refuge that are always threatened by destruction, and speak to her heroines’ feelings of self-destruction.

Have there been any articles or publications recently you’d like to draw our attention to?

Last year, I read Eugenia Zuroski’s A Funny Thing: Eighteenth-Century Undisciplined for fun. Like Nabugodi’s creative-critical work, it’s a monograph which challenges the shibboleths of academic writing, whilst also offering profoundly insightful close readings of primary texts by Eliza Haywood, Horace Walpole, and Frances Burney. As its title suggests, it is also laugh out loud funny!

I was also gripped by Nathan Hensley’s Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse which is frighteningly clear-sighted about extractive capitalism and climate disaster. It also has fantastic close readings of poetry by Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, among other foci.

When you are taking a break from research, what genre or authors do you like to check out?

I am such a nerd and read both Eugenia and Nathan’s recent monographs essentially for fun, but I also love young adult fiction - a couple of summers ago I read all of the Geek Girl series - and my go-to holiday read is anything from Lee Child’s Reacher series. Sometimes you just need to imagine a big man hitting people!

That said, I recently listened to the new recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and felt compelled to buy the John Deathridge facing-page translation from Penguin Classics. It made me think of Action Without Hope as the opera begins with the extraction of the Rhinegold which sets in motion a chain of events forged by violence against women and between families that ends in apocalypse: it’s a surprisingly prescient allegory of capitalist ethics and climate crisis!