Isobel Armstrong's Phenomenology Of Mind

Isobel Armstrong has been one of the most powerful, dynamic and inspirational figures in literary and cultural studies over the last three decades. She graduated with a BA English from the University of Leicester in 1959, and in 1963 she completed her PhD. That same year she took up the post of lecturer at UCL, where she stayed until 1970. From 1971-9 she worked as lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of Leicester. It was there in 1972 that she published Victorian Scrutinies, a book in which she inaugurated her long and continuing involvement with the historical meaning and force of poetry.
When she took up her Professorship at the University of Southampton in 1979, English studies in this country were being to feel the bracing Gallic winds of

In characterising what she takes from that work, I think she does a good job of describing what her example gives to others: Hegel, she says, 'understands the complexity of thinking, which is at the heart of his writings - thought grasping thought with thought. A Bacchanalian revel…[but] also a labour on the world'.
A previous holder of the Chair in English, when asked how she would like us to mark her retirement, said thank you very much and could she have a full-scale production of Hamlet please - oh, and perhaps it would be alright if she played the part of Gertrude. The event with which Isobel Armstrong's retirement was marked was not quite so theatrical, but it was certainly a hugely dramatic production. Around 200 fellow-academics, friends and students past and present gathered in London for an extraordinary symposium to celebrate her work and its vast energising influence. She imparted to this occasion the same kind of glamour that has always spilled from her at Birkbeck - and she will be pleased to have me remind you that this somewhat shopworn word 'glamour' originally meant the literal power of