Overview

Peter Riley's research examines nineteenth- through early twentieth-century American literature in relation to labour history, poetry and poetics, and archival studies, with developing focuses on German American literature, abolitionist politics, and race and ethnicity in the United States. He also writes non-fiction, and is particulalry interested in the relationship between creative and critical prose.

His most recent book Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger won the Ideas Prize for Non-Fiction. An experimental memoir, the book explores his involvement in one of Britain’s most bizarre subcultures: each time a whale washes up on our shores, a fugitive community of human scavengers descends to claim its trophies. Some are driven by magical beliefs; some are motivated by profit. For others, the need is much stranger. Mixing natural history, conspiracy theory, politics, and gore, Strandings was described by Iain Sinclair as “a brave, reckless and engaging performance”, and by Jean Sprackland as a “glorious rollercoaster of a book, whose twists and turns take us again and again to the dissolving edges between reality and mirage.” The book was recently featured as the cover story of the Financial Times Weekend Magazine.

His first academic monograph, Against Vocation: Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. It explores how the poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Hart Crane the advertising copywriter complicates an assumed divide between the work of poetry and other “lesser” or contingent forms of labour. Ousting poetic production from its sanctuary of exemption and repose, the book recasts poetic work as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labour’s emerging divisions and hierarchies.

He has edited Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for the Oxford World’s Classics series (forthcoming September 2024), and is working on two further books: a popular history of fossil hunting, and a project provisionally entitled Another Language/Another America: The German-American Renaissance 1848-1871, for which he was recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

In collaboration with Preston Street Films, Peter has also made a radio documentary based on Strandings, which is due to air on BBC Radio 4 on 28 April at 7:15pm.

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Publications

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| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2019 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 |

2024

• Riley P. (2024) Leaves of Grass, Oxford World's Classics.

2023

• Riley P. (2023) “Arm, fortify, harden, make lithe, himself”: Manly Health, German Turners, and the Poetics of Training, The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, Oxford University Press.

2022

• Riley P. (2022) "The Fair Poet's Name": Late Poems, A New Companion to Herman Melville, Wiley-Blackwell.
• Riley P. (2022) Strandings: Confessions of a Whale Scavenger, Profile Books.
• Riley PJ. (2022) Whitman, Circulation, and Care, American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877, Cambridge University Press.

2019

• Riley P. (2019) Every Atom: Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200, North American Review. [PDF]
• Riley PJ. (2019) Before 1848, Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism, Bloomsbury.
• Riley PJ. (2019) “Permit to Speak at Every Hazard”: Whitman’s Grammar of Risk, The New Whitman Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions, Cambridge University Press, DOI:10.1017/9781108296830.014.
• Riley PJ. (2019) Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry: Against Vocation:, Oxford University Press, DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198836254.001.0001.

2017

• Riley PJ. (2017) ‘Wet Paper Between Us’: Walt Whitman and the Transformations of Labor, The Cambridge History of US Working Class Literature, Cambridge University Press.

2016

• Riley PJ. (2016) Herman Melville's Retirement, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville studies, volume 18, No. 3, pages 112-128, DOI:10.1353/lvn.2016.0043.

2015

• Riley PJ. (2015) Review of Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson (eds.), Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies, Journal of American Studies, volume 49, no. 4, pages 922-923.

2013

• Riley PJ. (2013) Roundtable - Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, Journal of American Studies, volume 47, no. 3, pages 832-835.
• Riley PJ. (2013) Metrical and Urban Forms in 'Clarel', Melville as Poet: The Art of Pulsed Life, Kent State University Press.

2012

• Riley PJ. (2012) Review, The International Melville Conference, Rome, Leviathan, pages 107-109.
• Riley PJ. (2012) Review of Betsy Erkilla, ed. Walt Whitman's Songs of Intimacy and Love: "Live Oak, with Moss" and "Calamus.", Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, volume 30, no. 2, pages 101-102.

2011

• Riley PJ. (2011) "Leaves of Grass" and Real Estate, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, volume 28, no. 4, pages 163-183.

2010

• Riley PJ. (2010) Report : Melville Society Archive Fellowship, Leviathan, volume 12, no. 2, pages 107-110.

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Biography

Peter (re-) joined Exeter after spending two years as Associate Professor in Poetry and Poetics at Durham University. Before that, between 2014-2020, he was Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Exeter. Before that he was an Early Career Fellow in American Literature at Oxford. 

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