Jeremy Tambling


Jeremy Tambling B.A, M.Phil, PhD is a British writer and critic.
He was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013.
His most recent position is Professor of English at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw.
He has won a number of awards for his scholarship including research grants for his work on Blake, Dante, and Henry James and is a recurring face on the conference scene; four times on Dickens in 2012.
Tambling’s literary interests range from Boccaccio to Kafka, Chaucer to Cinema. More specifically he has published books on Blake, Dickens and the nineteenth-century and cities within literature. Publication of his book Opera and the Culture of Fascism was met by a number of distressed voices from the operatic world.

Education and teaching

Jeremy Tambling spent much of his youth in South-East London, at Dulwich College. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of York in 1969, where a major influence was Dr F.R. Leavis. He completed his M.Phil at the University of Nottingham in "The Intellectual and Cultural Milieu of Dickens’s Novels" in 1973, and his PhD at Essex University in "Vo significando: The Heuristic Art of Dante’s Commedia" in 1985.
Tambling has a broad background in teaching ranging from Comprehensive Schools in England to lecturing, and then Professorship in Comparative Literature, at the University of Hong Kong, a position he held for over 18 years. He is interested in education at all levels, is a prison-visitor, and likes critical approaches which question disciplinary limits in the humanities and social sciences.

Published work

Tambling has produced many articles and written many books. His article explored Dickens’s interest in the penal system and also developed the concept of the ‘docile body’. It was published in four collections of Dickens criticism.
His expertise ranges from Dante to Dickens, Anachronism to Allegory and Nietzsche to Nihilism. His interest in Literary Theory is extensive; main areas of focus include: Marxist theory, Nietzsche and modernity, Freud, and gender and sexuality. Current research includes work on cities in literature and a history of the Devil; with reference to Freud, Blake and Dostoevsky.

Publications (single authorship)

  1. Opera, Ideology and Film.
  2. Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia An excerpt was reprinted in the anthology "Classical and medieval Criticism published Gale Research Press, 1989, in their "Literary Criticism" series.]
  3. What is Literary Language?.
  4. Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject.
  5. Narrative and Ideology.
  6. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold 7 Versions of two chapters from this appeared in Essays in Criticism: one chapter, on Great Expectations, has been reprinted in four separate anthologies of Dickens criticism: by editors Roger Sell; Steven Connor; Michael Cotsell; Michael Hollington.
  7. Opera and the Culture of Fascism.
  8. Henry James: Critical Issues.
  9. Lost in the American City: Dickens, James and Kafka.
  10. Becoming Posthumous.
  11. Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.
  12. Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare.
  13. Blake's Night Thoughts.
  14. Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun’s Fiction.
  15. Re-Verse: Turning Towards Poetry.
  16. Going Astray: Dickens and London.
  17. : Walking Macao: Reading the Baroque.
  18. Allegory .
  19. On Anachronism.
  20. Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect.
  21. On Reading the Will: Law and Desire in Literature and Music.
  22. Literature and Psychoanalysis.
  23. Hölderlin and the Subject of Tragedy: Readings in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Benjamin
  24. The Palgrave Handbook to Literature and the City. ed. Jeremy Tambling.
  25. Dickens' Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature in the City.
  27. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance of Death.