David Stewart

David Stewart is a specialist in Romantic-period literature and culture. He has published three books and over 20 articles and chapters on topics including periodicals, print culture, poetic form, periodisation, the city, landscape, and mobility.

His first monograph, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), explores the decade following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in which the literary magazine rose to prominence. It claims the magazine as a form unusually well-placed to explore and reflect creatively upon a literary culture that was expanding so rapidly writers and readers could not keep up. It considers a wide range of magazines and writers, most centrally the periodicals of Leigh Hunt, Blackwood's Magazine, the London Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine.

His second book, The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s: A Period of Doubt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), explores the poetry of a period often depicted as a dead end between Romanticism and Victorianism. Drawing on new data about the publishing market, the book shows that poetry publication was in fact buoyant: it considers the work of a range of poets including Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hood, and the literary annuals. Yet it was a 'period of doubt' because poets began to question the place of poetry in culture. The complex forms their poems took are worth prizing exactly in their doubtful self-questioning.

He is the co-editor, with John Gardner, of Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s (Cambridge University Press, 2024). This volume collects an international group of scholars to reimagine a decade usually ignored as an unproductive gap between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The decade is in fact extraordinarily busy, with new cultural forms around the globe developing to take the temperature of this self-conscious decade. 

Other publications include considerations of the development of the short story, celebrity in the periodical press, literary London, Lord Byron at the Newcastle Literary & Philosophical Society, periodisation, accidental poetry, and Wordsworthian parody. His current work focuses on topics including landscape and literary form with a special interest in the work of James Hogg and Walter Scott.

David Stewart is Associate Professor of Romantic Literature. 

David joined Northumbria in 2009, having previously taught at the University of Glasgow. His first degree, in English and Philosophy, was from the University of Stirling. After this he studied for a Masters and a PhD at the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

His research focuses on the literature and culture of the Romantic period. He has published books on the literary magazines of the 1810s and 1820s, the poetry of the 1820s and 1830s, and the 1830s as a decade of transition. His work focuses on poetics, print culture, book history, and landscape.