Professor Clive Probyn

Background

Clive Probyn was educated at the universities of Nottingham (UK) and (as a Fulbright Scholar) Virginia (USA). He taught at the the University of Lancaster (UK) until 1982, and for two years was Foundation Professor of English, Head of Modern European Languages, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Islamic Studies at the University of Sokoto, Nigeria. He came to Monash in 1982, and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia.

He has published fifteen books and many articles on eighteenth-century topics, including The Art of Jonathan Swift; Jonathan Swift: the Contemporary Background; Swift's Gulliver's Travels; The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding (with Martin Battestin);The Sociable Humanist; A Life of James Harris (1709-80): Provincial and Metropolitan Culture in Eighteenth Century England; English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789; and a handbook, English Poetry. He was the founding President of the Johnson Society of Australia, and his David Fleeman lecture on Johnson and Australia was published in 1998 as Pall Mall and the Wilderness of New South Wales. He has also written the new 15000-word biographical entry for Jonathan Swift for the New Dictionary of Biography, and shorter lives of Sarah Fielding, James Harris, Thomas Chubb, Esther ("Vanessa") Vanhomrigh and Stella Johnson.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities; a foundation member of the Advisory Board for The Ehrenpreis Center and the journal Swift Studies in Mƒnster, Germany; and Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne.

Research Interests

His teaching interests include critical and cultural theory, the English eighteenth-century, regional literature in the north of England from 1850 to the present, West African literature in English (Wole Soyinka in particular) and aspects of Australian literature, including textual and editorial studies. Research interests (in addition to those above) include eighteenth-century English and Irish print culture, and authors Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope and the Scriblerians, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett.

With Bruce Steele he directs the Monash Henry Handel Richardson Project, the largest single project to date on an Australian author, which has produced new editions of Maurice Guest,The Getting of Wisdom, the first collection of HHR's Letters (3 vols, 2000) (nominated by the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies, Canberra as 'An Outstanding Contribution to Australian Culture' (2000), and two volumes of her unpublished music (Currency Press and the Marshall Hall Trust, 2000). Current work includes a full critical edition of HHR's trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Current Research Projects

Funded by ARC Discovery Grants, are:

1. an investigation into eighteenth-century Dublin and London Print Culture;
2. a full scholarly edition of Henry Handel Richardson's Australian trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Selected Publications

Books

West African Literature

• Wole Soyinka: The Road (London 1981)
• Gabriel Okara: The Voice (London, 1982)
• Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People (London, 1981)

Other

• The Sociable Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris 1709-80: Provincial and Metropolitan Culture in Eighteenth-century England. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991.
• English Poetry. 2nd edn, Longman, London, 1991.
• English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century: 1700-1789. 2nd edn, Longman, London, 1992.

Edited (with Bruce Steele)

• Niels Lyhne (Sirens' Voices), HHR's first 'book', a translation of J. P. Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne (1880), Australian Scholarly Publishing. Melbourne, 2003 (247 pp.).
• Henry Handel Richardson: The Letters. Melbourne University Press, 2000.
• The Getting of Wisdom . Queensland University Press, 1999.
• Maurice Guest. Queensland University Press, 1997.
• With M C Battestin, The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding . Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.

Recent Articles (2005)

• "Paradise and Cotton-mill: Rereading Eighteenth-century Romance" in Corinne Saunders, A Companion to Romance From Classical to Contemporary(Blackwell, London 2004), 251-68.
• "Referencing the Real: Hugh Blair, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, and the Limits of Representation", in Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr, eds, New Windows on a Woman's World (Otago, 2005), 258-275.
• "'Convict of lyes is every sign': Jonathan Swift and the Everyday", in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Munster Symposium, ed. Hermann Real and Helgard Stover-Leidig (Fink: Munchen, 2003), 23-35.
• Invited Plenary lecture, 'Skimming the Surfaces of A Tale of a Tub', Swift Seminar, Deanery House, Dublin, October 2004
• Lives of Jonathan Swift, Esther Vanhomrigh, Stella Johnson, Sarah Fielding, and Thomas Chubb, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , September 2004.