About
Bill Hughes was awarded a PhD in English Literature in 2010 from the University of Sheffield on communicative rationality and the Enlightenment dialogue in relation to the formation of the English novel. His research interests are in eighteenth-century literature; cultural and literary theory, particularly Raymond Williams, the Bakhtin circle, and the Frankfurt school; genre theory; aesthetics; intertextuality and the Semantic Web; and paranormal romance. He is co-founder, with Dr Sam George, of the
Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture Project at the University of Hertfordshire.
He has publications out or forthcoming on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Hamilton, Frances Burney, Sydney Owenson, Bernard Mandeville, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith. Bill has also published on Richard Hoggart, with contributions in
Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. by Sue Owen (Palgrave, 2008), and
Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, ed. by Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton (Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011). In addition, he is researching contemporary vampire literature and paranormal romance, co-editing (with Dr George) and contributing to two collections:
‘Open Graves, Open Minds’: Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present (Manchester University Press, 2013); and
In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild Children (Manchester University Press, 2020) and with articles forthcoming on the eighteenth-century novel and paranormal romance. This apparently disparate research is not unfocused; it has at its core Bill’s concerns with the Enlightenment as viewed through the theory of Habermas and the Marxist tradition.
Other Publications
Refereed journal articles:
‘“Through a glass darkly”: Reflection, representation, and mortality in ‘Eternity’ (Angel 1.17)’,
Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, 17.2 [50] (Summer / Fall, 2019).
‘“A devout but nearly silent listener”: Dialogue, sociability, and Promethean individualism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816)’,
The Irish Journal for Gothic Studies, no. 16 (2017)
‘
Jane Austen’s conversational pragmatics: Rational evaluation and strategic concealment in Sense and Sensibility’,
Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line, 32.2 (Summer 2012)
‘
Intertextuality and the Semantic Web: Jane Eyre as a test case for modelling literary relationships with Linked Data’ (with Sarah Bartlett, Talis Ltd),
Serials, 24.2 (July 2011), 160-65
Chapters in edited collections:
‘Genre mutation in YA Gothic: The dialectics of dystopia and romance in Holly Black’s
The Coldest Girl in Coldtown’, in
Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, ed. by Michelle Smith and Kristine Moruzi (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2021), pp. 37-59.
‘“Two kinds of romance”: Generic hybridity and epistemological uncertainty in contemporary Paranormal Romance’, in
Matizes do Gótico: Três Séculos de Horace Walpole, ed. by Júlio França and Luciana Colucci (Rio de Janeiro: Diologarts, 2020), pp. 35-70.
Introduction (with Sam George) to
In the Company of Wolves: Wolves, Werewolves and Wild Children, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 1‒17.
‘“The price of flesh is love”: Commodification, corporeality and paranormal romance in Angela Carter’s Beast Tales’, in
In the Company of Wolves: Wolves, Werewolves and Wild Children, pp. 147‒62.
‘“But by blood no wolf am I”: language and agency, instinct and essence – transcending antinomies in Maggie Stiefvater’s
Shiver trilogy’, in
Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic, ed. by Robert McKay and John Miller (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017), pp. 227‒49.
Introduction (with Sam George) to
‘Open Graves, Open Minds’: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
‘“Legally recognised undead”: Essence, Difference, and Assimilation in Daniel Waters’s
Generation Dead’, in
‘Open Graves, Open Minds’: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day.
‘Literate Sociology: Richard Hoggart’s Dialectic of the Particular and the General’, in
Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, ed. by Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2011), pp. 212-25.
‘The Uses and Values of Literacy: Richard Hoggart, Aesthetic Standards, and the Commodification of Working-class Culture’, in
Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. by Sue Owen (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 213-26.
Other:
Gothic Studies, In the company of wolves: werewolves, animality, and humanity special issue, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 21.1 (Spring 2019)
Gothic Studies, Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture special issue, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes, 15.1 (May 2013).
‘Talking Books: Conversational Life in the Eighteenth-Century Printed Dialogue’,
Exit 9: The Rutgers Journal of Comparative Literature, ‘Dialogues’ special issue, 7 (2005), 29-40.
Review of
The Eighteenth-Century Novel. Vol. v, ed. by Albert J. Rivero, George Justice, and Margo Collins, for
Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34.1 (March 2011).
Review of Michael McKeon,
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 15th Anniversary Edition, with a New Introduction by the Author, for
British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29.2 (2006).
In press/submitted:
‘Anon., The Heir of Montague’, entry in
The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660–1820, ed. by April London (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
In preparation:
Books and chapters:
The Eighteenth-Century Dialogue and Communicative Reason in the Formation of the English Novel: The Commerce of Light (monograph; forthcoming).
