Thomas Keymer

Thomas Keymer is Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is affiliated with University College and a Senior Fellow of Massey College. 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 with his family in 2006, he taught for ten years at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he remains a Supernumerary Fellow. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Historical Society, and the English Association, and has also held fellowships with the Leverhulme Trust, the Guggenheim Foundation, and All Souls College, Oxford. 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 copyright; life-writing, journalism, and subjectivity; theories of intertextuality, influence, and reception; the theory and practice of textual editing. He also has research and teaching interests in Civil War writing and British and Irish modernism. Past administrative roles include Interim Chair of the Department of English (2021-2) and Director of U of T's Collaborative Graduate Program in Book History & Print Culture (2013-17), a position he resumes as Acting Director in 2023-24. Between 2009 and 2022 he served as General Editor of The Review of English Studies (OUP); ongoing editorial projects include The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, The Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding, and The Cambridge History of London in Literature. He is writing a monograph, centered on Fielding, about literature, commerce, and what Fielding called 'the trade of authoring'.

Mailing Address

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

Publications

Books

Jane Austen: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2022) 

Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (OUP, 2020) 

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 (OUP, 2019) 

Prose Fiction in English from the Origins of Print to 1750, Vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OUP, 2018) 

(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

‘Circulation’, in Nicholas McDowell and Henry Power (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1640-1714 (Oxford: OUP, in press)

‘Civil Rage: Poetry and War in the 1740s’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 44.3, Special Issue on War Representation in memory of John Richardson (September 2020), 8-29 
 
‘Manuscript in the House of Print: Richardson and Media Shift after 1700’, in N. H. Keeble and Tessa Whitehouse (eds), Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford: OUP, 2019), 57-75 

‘The Subjective Turn’, in David Duff (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 311-26 
 
‘Fictions, Libels, and Unions in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Gerrard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (eds), Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 97-122 
 
‘Portraying the Life’, in Peter Sabor and Betty Schellenberg (eds), Samuel Richardson in Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2017), 1-17 
 
‘Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings: Amusement, Effusion, Nonsense’, in Kathryn Sutherland (ed.), Jane Austen: Writer in the World (Oxford: Bodleian Publications, 2017), 16-35  
 
‘Afterword’, ‘Mediating Richardson’ Special Issue, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29.2 (Winter 2016-17), 317-25 
 
(with Christopher Geary), ‘Seditious Libel in Eighteenth-Century Dublin: Polyphemus’s Farewel (1714)’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr 31 (2016), 168-76 
 
‘Poems in the Novel’, in Jack Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800 (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 72-87 
 
‘Restoration Fiction’, in J. A. Downie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2016), 155-71 
 
‘Small Particles of Fame: Subjectivity, Celebrity, Sterne’, in Peter de Voogd, Judith Hawley, and Melvyn New (eds), Sterne, Tristram, Yorick: Tercentenary Essays on Laurence Sterne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 3-24 
  
‘Fictions of the Union’, in Peter Garside and Karen O’Brien (eds), English and British Fiction 1750- 1820, Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OUP, 2015), 424-41 
 
‘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 
 
‘Paper Wars: Literature and/as Conflict During the Seven Years War’, in Frans de Bruyn and Shaun Regan (eds), The Culture of the Seven Years’ War: Empire, Identity, and the Arts in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 119-46 
 
‘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 
 
‘Epistolary Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Robert DeMaria, Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher (eds), A Companion to British Literature, 4 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), 3: 159-73