Thomas Keymer

Thomas Keymer is University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with University College. He currently directs U of T’s Collaborative Specialization in Book History & Print Culture, based at Massey College, where he is a Senior Fellow. Born in London, he studied at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, under the direction of J. H. Prynne, and was later Research Fellow and Quatercentenary Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Before moving to Toronto in 2006, he taught for six years at Royal Holloway, University of London, and ten years at St Anne's College, Oxford, where he remains a Supernumerary Fellow; he has also held a Visiting Professorship at the University of Exeter. For the past few years he has served as General Editor of the Review of English Studies, co-General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, and Senior Editor (Literature 1660-1830) of Oxford Handbooks Online. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Historical Society, and the English Association. His research and teaching focus mainly on Restoration, eighteenth-century and Romantic-period British and Irish literature, and he has particular interests in narrative and the novel; print, manuscript and history of the book; literature, politics and national identities; literature and law, especially censorship and libel; theories of intertextuality, influence and reception; the theory and practice of textual editing. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel 1660-1830 for OUP’s Clarendon Lectures in English series.

Mailing Address

Department of English, Jackman Humanities Building, Room 613 & 607, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8.

Publications

Books

(ed.) Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750, Vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OUP, forthcoming)

(ed.) William Beckford, Vathek (OUP, 2013)

(ed.) Samuel Johnson, Rasselas (OUP, 2009) 

(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (CUP, 2009)

(ed.) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, co-annotator James Kelly (OUP, 2007)

(ed.) Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (OUP, 2006)

Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, co-authored with Peter Sabor (CUP, 2005; paperback edn, 2009) 

(ed.) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, co-annotator Alice Wakely (Penguin, 2005)

(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to English Literature from 1740 to 1830, co-edited with Jon Mee (CUP, 2004)

Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (OUP, 2002)

(ed.) Samuel Richardson, Pamela, co-annotator Alice Wakely (OUP, 2001)

(ed.) Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (OUP, 1999)

(ed.) The Gentleman's Magazine in the Age of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols (Pickering & Chatto, 1998)

(ed.) Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (Penguin, 1996)

Richardson's Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (CUP, 1992; paperback edn, 2004) 

Articles

'Fictions of the Union', in Peter Garside and Karen O'Brien (eds), British Fiction from 1750 to 1820, Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OUP, 2015)

‘Johnson’s Poetry of Repetition’, in Howard D. Weinbrot (ed.), Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New Century (San Marino: Huntington Library / University of California Press, 2014), 71-87

‘Novel Designs: Manipulating the Page in English Fiction, 1660-1780’, in Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson (eds), New Directions in the History of the Novel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17-49

'Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict During the Seven Years War', in Frans de Bruyn and Sean Regan (eds), The Culture of the Seven Years' War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts (U of T Press, 2014)

‘Epistolary Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds), A Companion to British Literature, 4 vols (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 3: 159-73

'Narrative', in Janet Todd (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (CUP, 2013)

‘Afterword’, in Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (eds), Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-First Century: “By Succession of Delight” (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 227-32

'Richardson: The Epistolary Novel', in Michael Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists (CUP, 2012)

'Shakespeare and the Novel', in Peter Sabor and Fiona Ritchie (eds), Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (CUP, 2012)

'Obscenity and the Erotics of Fiction', in Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes (eds), The Cambridge History of the English Novel (CUP, 2012)

'Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility', in Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, 2nd edn (CUP, 2011)

'Daniel Defoe', in Adrian Poole (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (CUP, 2010)