Dr Joshua Schouten De Jel

Qualifications

BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing (First Class Honours), University of Plymouth

MA English and Culture (with Distinction), University of Plymouth

PhD, University of Plymouth

Professional membership

British Association for Romantic Studies

Teaching interests

Joshua teaches across the undergraduate programme at Plymouth, and has been the module leader on ENGL402 – Writing the Modern World (1600-1700), ENGL407 – Rewritings: Contemporary Literature and its Histories, ENGL509 – Women and Romanticism, and ENGL518 - The Impact of Publishing.

Research interests

My area of research specialism is Romantic literature. Specifically, I am interested in the Epicurean influence on the Romantics, especially William Blake. My 2021 monograph, Blake and Lucretius: The Atomistic Materialism of the Selfhood, contended that Blake consistently showed a familiarity with, and consequently incorporated across his entire mythopoeia, the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was principally transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ treatise De Rerum Natura in ways, and to an extent, which has hitherto been unacknowledged. By aligning his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the epistemological parameters of atomistic materialism, Blake mapped postlapsarian existence onto the philosophical framework of Epicurean cosmogony. As a result, when the subject succumbs to the Selfhood and once the Selfhood manipulates the subject’s ability to observe the external world, a psycho-topography – a psychological projection which takes on the physical attributes of phenomenological existence – is created which adheres to the principles of atomistic entropy, which Blake calls the cycle of Eternal Death. I am working on a subsequent monograph, continuing to explore Blake's use of Epicureanism. I am also considering a project which would discuss the wider influence of Epicurean epistemology on the Romantics.