Staff profile

I arrived in Durham in 2006, having previously, amongst other things, been a Junior Research Fellow in English at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge; I also had a temporary lectureship in 19th and 20th century English literature and intellectual history in Cambridge's English Faculty. I am the author of Landscape, Writing and ‘the Condition of England’: Ruskin to Modernism (2004) which analysed a line of non-fiction prose that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in response both to an expanding urban market for writing about rural England, and to a sense that the experience of a changing, increasingly urbanised and industrialised, landscape provided a visible index to the state of the nation. I have also published an edited and annotated collection of accounts of the life and work of John Ruskin by his contemporaries, for Pickering & Chatto’s series of Lives of Victorian Literary Figures (2005).

I am interested in later twentieth century and contemporary versions of similar 'condition of England' investigations, and have published work on the writer Iain Sinclair and the film-maker Patrick Keiller. I have also written on Ford Madox Ford's editorials for the English Review, on 'the question of voice' in the writer and literary critic, Richard Hoggart and on ‘Englishness’ in T.S. Eliot. I am also interested in the writer and novelist, Edward Upward, and have published in a recent essay collection on him.

I am currently writing a book provisionally entitled The Politics of Style, which examines a series of moments in the history of ‘socially descriptive non-fictional writing’ (Richard Hoggart) since the mid-nineteenth century in order to establish how this type of writing has been part of attempts to bring about a democratic public sphere in British society for shared discussion and debate, even as those attempts have been felt by its participants to be fraught with difficulty. Some of the argument is demonstrated in an article on 'Intellectuals and the Politics of Style', International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society (2017) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10767-016-9231-9

I have the following general areas of research and teaching interest:

- writers as intellectuals / intellectuals as writers, since the 19th century in Britain

- 'Condition of England' writing (e.g. Carlyle, Dickens, Forster, Auden, Orwell, to contemporary writers such as Roy Fisher and Jonathan Coe) in all genres (non-fiction, poetry, the novel, drama), particularly in relation to questions of landscape and place

- Debates about equality and inequality since the French Revolution, and how they are enacted or elaborated in particular literary texts, in relation to intellectual history (Burke, Marx, Nietzsche, Tawney, Thomas Piketty etc). I teach a Special Topic to final-year undergraduates called A Society of Equals? Literature, Culture and Equality which examines these pressing issues.

- the history of literary criticism in Britain, in particular debates about 'the function of criticism' (Arnold, Eliot, Leavis to Edward Said)

- the history of writers as public speakers, through the form of the public lecture, in 19th and 20th century Britain and America (i.e. Emerson, Ruskin, Morris, Wilde, T.S. Eliot)

- the role of the 'expert' in contemporary society, and the need for this figure to become less of an expert and more of what the Scottish philosopher, George Davie, called a 'democratic intellect.' These ideas are developed in my online publication, 'Brexit and the Democratic Intellect' https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/brexit-and-the-democratic-intellect/

- the character of contemporary British higher education, in relation to recent marketising reforms, and their effect on the lives of both students and academic staff

Finally, I am also a member of the Council for the Defence of British Universities (more information here http://cdbu.org.uk/).

Authored book

• Grimble, S. (2005). Lives of Victorian Literary Figures III: Elizabeth Gaskell, the Carlyles and John Ruskin by Their Contemporaries: Volume 3, John Ruskin. Pickering & Chatto
• Grimble, S. (2004). Landscape, Writing and 'The Condition of England': 1878-1917, Ruskin to Modernism. Edwin Mellen Press

Book review

• Grimble, S. (2019). LUCY HARTLEY, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life. Notes & Queries, 66(4), 605-606. https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz146
• Grimble, S. (2007). 'Nation & Landscape, 1840-1920', review of R. Ebbatson, An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920. English literature in transition, 1880-1920, 50(4), 467-470

Chapter in book

• Grimble, S. (2024). ‘The Whole Man’: Morris’s Public Lectures. In M. Waithe (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Morris (111-121). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108939942.012
• Grimble, S. (2022). Gaskell’s Manchester. In J. Tambling (Ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies (736-741). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_174-1
• Grimble, S. (2021). What Kind of Person Should the Critic Be?. In A. Sridhar, M. A. Hosseini, & D. Attridge (Eds.), The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (173-191). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9_9
• Grimble, S. (2013). 'Only degradation and slavery'?: the figure of the teacher in the writing of Edward Upward. In B. Ed. Kohlmann (Ed.), Edward Upward and left-wing literary culture in Britain (69-82). Ashgate Publishing
• Grimble, S. (2011). 'Englishness'. In J. Ed. Harding (Ed.), T.S. Eliot in Context. Cambridge University Press
• Grimble, S. (2010). 'A Few Inches Above the Moral Atmosphere of These Islands': the Perspectives of the English Review. In J. Ed. Harding (Ed.), Ford Madox Ford, modernist magazines and editing (153-168). Rodopi
• Grimble, S. (2008). "Stances and Tones before Life": Richard Hoggart and the Question of Voice. In S. Ed. Owen (Ed.), Re-Reading Richard Hoggart: Life, Literature, Language, Education (118-130). Cambridge Scholars Press
• Grimble, S. (2003). Somewhere to Stand: Descriptive Writing and Cultural Criticism in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory. In M. Dorrian, & G. Rose (Eds.), Deterritorialisations ... revisioning landscapes and politics (175-181). Black Dog

Journal Article

• Grimble, S. (2020). 'A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish': imagining 'equal ground' in Gaskell, Eliot and Dickens. La Questione Romantica, 12(1-2), 121-137
• Grimble, S. (2016). Intellectuals and the Politics of Style. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 30(3), 245-257. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-016-9231-9
• Grimble, S. (2005). 'A bridge between imagination and reality must be built ...': landscapes and politics in the films of Patrick Keiller. Literary London, 3(1),

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Grimble, S. (2017). ‘The Critic as the Intervening Figure’, review of Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert's Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. [Review]

Other (Print)

• Grimble, S. (2017). Brexit and the Democratic Intellect: Papers and poems from a symposium held at Durham University 13th – 14th January 2017