Professor Jeremy Tambling

Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic, who has been engaged with education and teaching at all levels and across the range, including holding the Chair of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and of Literature in Manchester. After reading English at York, where F.R. Leavis was the dominant influence, and gave him the sense that education must communicate, he took a two-year M.Phil, at Nottingham on Dickens. Work on this writer has generated, to date, three monographs, and much other work on the nineteenth-century, including Ruskin and George Eliot.

For his PhD, at Essex, Tambling worked on Dante, wanting to make connections with critical theory (Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan), and he has since published three monographs on Dante, the latest on Paradiso. As a literary scholar, he uses critical and cultural theory, and outstandingly the culture of cities, especially London, as a way of approaching writing on many forms and periods of literature as well as film, and opera: his first book, after completing the PhD, was Opera, Ideology and Film (1987).

Professor Tambling divides his writing between monographs which explore a topic or author in depth; books aimed at teaching critical concepts and practices, such as psychoanalysis, and allegory; and writing reviews. He is fascinated by theatre and film; and as a research interest and beyond that, he explores relationships between tragedy, madness, carnival, folly, poetry, and the diabolical; between anything which speaks of excess in Bataille’s sense; all forms of ‘other’ spaces, including cities and prisons (he is a prison visitor); and anything that overturns settled chronological thought, history as ‘progress’ and what Walter Benjamin calls ‘empty homogeneous time’.