Derek Alsop

I am a Senior Teaching Fellow and Professor of English Literature at the University of Chester, where I was Head of English from 2004-2010, before stepping down from that role to concentrate on research and teaching. I specialize in literature and music, 1660-1770 and 1930-1990. My Ph.D (1985) was on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and I have published on a range of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors (writing a survey of the whole period in Studying English Literature, ed. Ashley Chantler and David Higgins (London: Continuum, 2010)). In the modern period a particular interest is the work of Samuel Beckett, with three articles appearing in 2013: “Textual Variants in Cascando: An Argument for a Scholarly Edition” for the Journal of Beckett Studies; “Federman’s Beckett: Two Voices in the Closet” for Modernism/Modernity); and "Playing On: Chess and its Metaphors in the Life and Work of Samuel Beckett" for Critical Quarterly. Since 1993 I have completed over thirty programmes for BBC Radio 3 on literature and music, with ten programmes on Handel, and others featuring Monteverdi, Mozart, Britten, Finzi, Holst and Vaughan Williams. The subjects of these programmes have often been the composers’ adaptations of literary sources. Handel has also been the subject of book chapters and an article for The Musical Quarterly, “Artful Anthology: The Use of Literary Sources for Handel’s Jephtha” (OUP, 2004). I also co-authored, with Chris Walsh, a book on reader theory, The Practice of Reading: Interpreting the Novel (Macmillan, 1999). Forthcoming research includes work on variation in da capo aria form in Handel’s Italian operas, and the use of embedding in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. My blog 'Derek Alsop's Handel Archive' has had nearly 6,000 hits from all over the world since its introduction in 2013.