Dr Mark Jones

PhD Columbia

Contact Information

Office: Watson 430
Office Hours:
Extension: 74417
E-mail: jonesmc@queensu.ca

Research Interests

British Romantic poetry; L18–E19C publicity, propaganda, and public opinion; William Cobbett; literature and economics; parody; history of literary criticism and theory; Bob Dylan.

Recent Publications

• “Queen’s ‘Academic Planning’ Exercises, 2009-10: A Critical History with Documents,” Real Academic Planning Blog, 8 September 2010.
• “Selling Out the Future: Away from Academic Planning for Queen’s University. Reflections on the Report ‘Imagining the Future: Towards an Academic Plan for Queen’s University,’ ” Real Academic Planning Blog, 2 September 2010.
• “Failed by the ‘Star’ System” (with Patricia Rae, Annette Burfoot, and Frank Burke), CAUT Bulletin, 57.6 (June 2010).
• “Queen’s train wreck coming?” letter, Whig Standard, 5 May 2010.
• “Why Not Hear What People Have to Say about Aiming for Less? A Reply to Principal Daniel Woolf (25 April 2010),” Real Academic Planning Blog.
• “Objections to the Faculty of Arts and Science Draft Response,” QUFA Forum, 25 March 2010.
• “What Queen’s will have lost: Financial set-backs will lead to a loss in quality education at our institution.” Queen’s Journal, 11 September 2009.
• Review of Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and Their Books, 1724–1990: Longevity in Publishing, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 47.2 (2009): 282–84.
• “ ‘Population Thinking’: Keats and the Romance of Public Opinion,” The Wordsworth Circle 38 (winter-spring 2007): 63–70.

Remarks

Author of The “Lucy Poems”: A Case Study in Literary Knowledge (U of Toronto P, 1995); co-author of Wordsworth Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1985). Author of articles including “Alarmism, Public Sphere Performatives, and the Lyric Turn; Or, What is ‘Fears in Solitude’ Afraid of?” boundary 2 30 (2003); “Parody and its Containments,” Representations (1996); “Double Economics: Ambivalence in Wordsworth’s Pastoral” PMLA (1993); “Spiritual Capitalism: Wordsworth and Usury,” JEGP (1993); and “Interpretation in Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism (1991).

I have supervised or co-supervised PhD and MA theses on William Wordsworth, William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Paul Muldoon. I am currently first reader for a doctoral thesis on Scottish travel literature and Romanticism and second reader for another on Blake.

At present I am seeking to place an article on Keats’s intersubjective poetics and the letter e while working on a book on Romantic writers and the invention of public opinion. I am also working on an edition of William Cobbett’s Paper against Gold and beginning research on Bob Dylan, beginning with a new (fall 2010) graduate course on Dylan’s song lyrics.

Recently I have given increasing time and effort to opposition within Queen’s academic politics.

• In 2008–10 I opposed what I still view as the degradation of our English Literature curriculum, beginning with the replacement of ENGL 110 (which had core contents) with ENGL 100 (which has no core content).
• In 2009 I became a member, and in 2010 a co-chair, of QUFA’s Political Action and Communications Committee (2010–12).
• In 2010 I helped found the group Queen’s Employees for Real Academic Planning, which is now in coalition with the parallel student group, as Queen’s Students and Employees for Real Academic Planning (QSERAP), and in June 2010 I helped create (and have since maintained) the Real Academic Planning Blog. For an overview of these issues, see “Queen’s ‘Academic Planning’ Exercises, 2009-10: A Critical History with Documents.”