Dr Joanne Parker
Research interests
- Victorian Britain
- Historical fiction
- Literature and national identity
- Literature and the landscape
Joanne Parker has published primarily on Victorian reinventions of the past, the mythologisation of historical figures in the nineteenth century, and the influence of this upon modern culture. Her first book, England's Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great examined the nineteenth-century fascination with the Saxon King Alfred - in literature, but also in fine art, political rhetoric, and public commemoration. She has also worked on the Victorian legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, examining what these can reveal about national, regional, political and gender identities, and she contributed to the AHRB-funded project, The Image of the Druid, 1500-2000, with Professor Ronald Hutton.
She is currently researching for a second academic monograph, on Megaliths and the British Imagination, 1789-2000, which will examine the meanings and significance attributed to stone circles and standing stones by authors and artists from the Romantic period to the modern day. At the same time, she is working on a broader cultural history of ways of seeing the shape of Britain, which will be published by Atlantic as an illustrated book, and is editing the proceedings of two recent conferences on ‘The Cultural Reception of Prehistoric Monuments' and ‘Celtic Romanticism and Gothic Revisionism'.
