Denise Gigante

Denise Gigante teaches British poetry with a concentration in the Romantic period. She is the author, most recently, of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale University Press, 2023), a study of the dispersal of Charles Lamb’s library in the mid-nineteenth century. It former is available in Audible Books and is currently being translated into Chinese and Arabic. Her most recent edited book is The Cambridge History of the British Essay (2024), the first authoritative single-volume history of the essay form's development within the British literary tradition. It includes her “Preface to a History in the Form of an Essay” and her chapter on “The Bibliographical Essay.”

She is also the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, (Harvard UP, 2011), which was a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice for 2011; Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005). Her scholarly articles and book chapters range across the topics of taste, aesthetics, and poetic form.

She is currently completing work on The Mental Traveller: William Blake. The book grows out of her Clarendon Lectures at Oxford University (2020) and will be published by Oxford University Press. It is a study of Blake’s illuminated poetry in the context of Christian artwork from the late twelfth through the early sixteenth century. It is concerned with the nature of salvation history set against the radical, mystical, and revolutionary energies of Catholicism as developed on the Italian peninsula—and as expressed allegorically, symbolically, and schematically or diagrammatically.