Dr. Neth teaches courses on the British Romantic poets at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including a course he developed on the Verbal and Visual Art of William Blake. He also regularly teaches English 3400 (European Literature: Beginnings to 1400). He developed and taught an Honors course on the comparative study of poetry and painting; he regularly teaches English 3020, the second part of the survey course requred of all English majors. Neth is the Faculty Advisor for the MTSU Great Books Interdisciplinary Minor, which he designed in 1999. Neth's published research has focused primarily on the textual study and interpretation of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1991, he became the first MTSU faculty member to be awarded a Summer Stipend by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), with which he traveled to the Bodleian Library of Oxford University to co-edit (with Donald H. Reiman) Shelley's manuscript notebook used during the composition of his poem, Hellas. This was published in 1994 as volume XVI of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts. Three more trips to the UK over the next decade prepared Neth to edit Shelley's longest poem, the 4800-line epic Laon and Cythna (1817), for volume 3 of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (CPPBS), which was published by Johns Hopkins UP in 2012. Neth and his three co-editors on this volume won the 2011-2012 Richard J. Finneran Award, bestowed biennially by the Society for Textual Scholarship on the best edition or book on editorial theory. He has won a share of two three-year, $180,000 grants awarded by NEH to continue CPPBS and is currently writing the editorial commentary for his edition of Oedipus Tyrannus, to appear in the forthcoming volume 5 of CPPBS. He is also scheduled to edit Hellas for volume 7 of the series. His piece on Shelley's pre-emptive self-censorships in the draft manuscripts of Laon and Cythna in light of the special restrictions on press freedom in Britain during 1817 was published in a University of Delaware Press collection of essays in honor of Donald H. Reiman.  In 2019, he guest-edited a special issue of The European Legacy devoted to the topic "Improvisation and Hybrid Genres in British Romanticism" which included contributions on a variety of Romantic writers by eight leading Romanticists. He presently teaches the Buchanan Fellows' required ENGL 2020-H01 course, Greek Origins of Western Culture, in the Honors College.

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Editions 

• Editor. Laon and Cythna. In vol. III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (CPPBS). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.
  • Poem and Primary Collations: pp. 109-320;
  • Introduction, Commentary and Supplements: pp. 550-941;
  • Historical Collations and Appendixes: pp. 993-1061, 1077-1082.
• Editor. Oedipus Tyrannus (Swellfoot the Tyrant). Forthcoming in vol. V of CPPBS, 2019.
• Editor. Hellas. Forthcoming in vol. VI of CPPBS, 2020.
• Co-editor (with Donald Reiman). Bodleian Shelley MS. adds e. 7. The "Hellas" Notebook. Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts XVI . New York: Garland Press, 1994.

Guest Editor, Special Issue of The European Legacy 24, 3-4 (May, 2019), devoted to the topic of "Improvisation and Hybrid Genres in British Romantic Literature."  Includes original essays by Bernard Beatty, Stephen Behrendt, Ben Colbert, Richard Cronin, Nora Crook, Nancy Goslee, Jerrold E. Hogle, Steven E. Jones, and Michael J. Neth.  My Introduction appears on pages 259-263.  This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Michael O'Neill.

Online Article

• "Draft Variants from the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and the New Edition of Laon and Cythna": 200 pages. Published in 2012 concurrently with the print publication of vol. III of CPPBS. Accessible on Romantic Circles at http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/laon_cythna/ 

Print Articles

• "'This Remarkable Piece of Antiquity': Epic Conventions in Shelley's Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant." The European Legacy, 24, 3-4 (May, 2019): 396-422.
• "A Committee of One: Shelley's Preemptive Self-Censorships in the Draft Manuscripts of Laon and Cythna and Legal Censorship of the Press." In Publishing, Editing, Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman.  Ed. Michael Edson. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2015. 215-43.
• "Unity in Diversity: Re-reading Aeschylus's Persians as a Multicultural Work." Universality and History: Foundations of Core. Ed. Don Thompson, Darrel Colson, and J. Scott Lee. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. 125-133.
• "Rehistoricizing the History of Ideas." American Notes and Queries 6.2-3(1993): 89-96.

Translation

• "The Subject-Object Relation in Aesthetics" by Georg Lukacs. Critical Texts IV (Autumn 1986): 1-23.

Review Essays

• "Thinking Originally with Wordsworth and Kant": 5600-word Review Essay of On Poetry and Philosophy: Thinking Metaphorically with Wordsworth and Kant, by Brayton Polka; fully annotated with bibliography. Forthcoming in The European Legacy. 
• "English Romantic Poetry's Clash of the Generations": Review Essay of William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry After Waterloo, by Jeffrey N. Cox, The European Legacy 28.5-6 (2023), 527-32.
• "British Romanticism and the Resurgence of the History of Ideas": Review Essay of British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason by Timothy Michael; Love Letters and the Romantic Novel during the Napoleonic Wars by Sharon Worley; and Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History by Alan Bewell.  The European Legacy 26.3-4 (2021), 374-383; fully annotated with bibliography.
• "The Afterlives of an Ideal: Isaiah Berlin on the Romantic Movement": Review Essay of The Roots of Romanticism, 2nd edition, by Isaiah Berlin. The European Legacy 22.4 (June 2017), 472-479; fully annotated with bibliography.
• "From Birth to Being: Enlightenment Philosophers, Romantic Poets, and the Growth of Language":  Review Essay of Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture by Ann Wierda Rowland and Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley by John Beer. The European Legacy 20:1-2 (2015), 68-72.
• "The Many Revolutions of British Romanticism": Review Essay of The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb; British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of Their Literary Criticism, ed. Mary A. Waters; and Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s: Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Inchbald, by Amy Garnai. The European Legacy, 17:3 (2012), 383-391.
• "The Interdisciplinary Enlightenment": Review Essay of Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature. The European Legacy 15:7 (2010), 887-890.
• "Poetry in British Romanticism": Review Essay of Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism by Susan Wolfson and Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson by Lisa Steinman. The European Legacy 9:5 (2004), 649-53.

Book Reviews

• Review of Bysshe Inigo Coffey's Shelley's Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song, on Romantic Circles website: http://romantic-circles.org/reviews-blog/bysshe-inigo-coffey-shelley%E2%80%99s-broken-world-fractured-materiality-and-intermitted-song  (January, 2022)
• Review of Matthew J.A. Green's Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake, in The European Legacy 11:7 (December, 2006), 829-30.  
• Review of Terence Allan Hoagwood's Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts, in The European Legacy 4:3 (June 1999): 107-109. 
• Review of William D. Brewer's The Shelley-Byron Conversation, in American Notes and Queries 9.2 (1996): 61-64. 
• Review of Linda Lewis's The Promethean Politics of Milton, Blake, and Shelley, in Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1994): 199-201. 
• Review of Timothy Clark's Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley, in Keats-Shelley Journal 40(1991): 185-87. 
• "Johnny One-Note." Review of Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, in The American Scholar 60.4 (1991): 608-13. 
  
• "In the Academy." Review of Peter Shaw's The War Against the Intellect, in Commentary 88.6 (December, 1989): 68-70. 

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