Alexander Lynch

My PhD project concerns what I call ‘political miracles’: that is, individual or collective actions providentially adequate to the circumstances of the community. In my dissertation, I trace the figure of this diffusely theological wonder as it emerges in the novels of Mary Shelley and George Eliot and the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred Tennyson. Representing the political miracle, I contend, helps these rather different authors make sense of the stakes and practice of collective life in an age in which one can act politically ‘without ever encountering God’, in Charles Taylor’s phrase. Ranging from the intimacy of a transformative conversation to the apocalyptic grandeur of the French Revolution, my dissertation aims to show how the British literature of the nineteenth century instructs us in what Coleridge would call an ‘allocosmic’ politics, an approach to our political projects in this world that grounds them in the eternal, evental ‘Now’ of another world.

I received my BA (Hons) in English with High Distinction from St Michael’s College, University of Toronto and my MPhil in English Studies with Distinction from Trinity College, Cambridge, where I was supported by a Dunlevie King’s Hall Studentship. My doctoral research, supervised by Professor Jan-Melissa Schramm, is supported by the OOC DTP, Trinity College, the University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge Trust.