Douglas Murray

Biography

Douglas Murray (Ph.D, University of North Carolina) is a Professor of English. He gravitates toward British rather than American literature and feels most at home with works of the 17th-early 20th centuries. His favorite novelist is Jane Austen, whose works he has helped edit for the Oxford University Press. Favorite poets include Donne, Pope, Blake, Hopkins and Eliot. His missions include teaching readers to feel poetry in their bones and to expand their reading beyond works penned in the last 15 minutes. He teaches Surveys of British Literature on the undergraduate and graduate levels, and advanced courses on the 18th century, the Gothic, Jane Austen and the British novel. He loves working with freshmen (First-Year Writing) and is always encouraging students to study abroad, especially in Britain and France. He is also a musician, serving as organist at the Nashville's Second Presbyterian Church. His musical specialties include improvisation in the French and baroque styles and all music associated with the Church of England. He has been a prize-winner in three international improvisation competitions: the American Guild of Organists National Competition in 2012 and 2014 and the University of Michigan Competition in 2016. He has been named a Visiting Fellow at the Chawton House Library in England fur June 2017.

Major Publications

• "The Musical Structure of Dryden's 'Song for St. Cecilia's Day,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (Spring 1977), 326- 34.
• "The English Teacher and English Song," College English, 47 (February 1985), 176-80.
• "Classical Myth in Richardson's Clarissa: Ovid Revised." Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 3 (January 1991), 112-124.
• "Gazing and Avoiding the Gaze: Jane Austen's Persuasion Years." In Jane Austen's Business. Ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel. London: Macmillan, 1996. Pp 42-53.
• "Spectatorship in Mansfield Park: Looking and Overlooking." Nineteenth-Century Literature, 52 (1997), 1-26.
• "A 'Serious Epidemic': Frances Trollope and the Evangelical Movement." In Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change. Ed. Brenda Ayres, London: Greenwood Press, 2002. 71-84.
• "Jane Austen’s 'passion for taking likenesses': Portraits of the Prince Regent in Emma.” Persuasions. 29 (2007). 132-144.
• “Donwell Abbey and Box Hill: Purity and Danger in Jane Austen’s Emma.” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 66:277 (December 2015), 954-970.

Editions

• Austen, Jane. Catharine and Other Writinqs (in collaboration with Margaret Anne Doody). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1998.
• Trollope, Frances. The Vicar of Wrexhill. Vol II in The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, 4 vols). London, Pickering and Chatto, 2008.