Peter Barry (poet)
Peter Thomas Barry FEA, FLSW is a British writer, poet, and literary theorist. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Aberystwyth University and a Fellow of both the English Association and the Learned Society of Wales. Barry is best known for his influential textbook Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, which has shaped the teaching of literary theory in the English-speaking world. His research focuses on contemporary British poetry, literary theory, and pedagogy, and he has also written on ecocriticism, urban poetics, and the history of modern British poetry. In addition to his academic work, Barry has published poetry in journals such as Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, and Stand.
Background
Peter Barry was born on 30 November 1947 in Liverpool, England and educated in Catholic grammar schools and at Upholland College in Lancashire. He studied English at King's College London and American Studies at London University's Institute of United States Studies, where he was taught by Howell Daniels and Eric Mottram. He published a reminiscence of his London years in Robert Gavin Hampson and Ken Edwards, Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s. His two main academic appointments were at La Sainte Union College of Higher Education, Southampton, as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in English, and at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Here he was appointed as Senior Lecturer, and subsequently promoted to Reader and Professor of English. He is currently Emeritus Professor of English.He was the editor of English for twenty years and was elected a Fellow of the English Association. In 2017, he was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
Work
Barry's fields of academic specialism are contemporary poetry and literary theory. During the 1970s, he co-edited the poetry magazine Alembic, which he co-edited with Robert Gavin Hampson. He subsequently published Contemporary British poetry and the city. This literary critical study of contemporary poets writing about the city was followed by Poetry Wars: British poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, an archive-based account of events in the Poetry Society in the 1970s. Poetry Wars received a positive review from Matthew Francis in the poetry journal P. N. Review.Barry returned to poetry and the city in a series of essays. These include his contributions to Gladsongs and Gatherings: Poetry in its Social Context in Liverpool since the 1960s and Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews, as well as 'London in Twentieth-Century Poetry' in The Cambridge Companion to London in English Literature ; 'Poetry and the City' in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010 ; and 'Mapping the Geographies of Hurt in Barry MacSweeney and S. J. Litherland' in Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry.
At the same time, Barry was also publishing on literary theory. His first book in this field was Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. This work has now gone through three editions and sold over 300,000 copies. According to Professor Steven Regan, Beginning Theory has had 'a vital role in shaping the way that theory is taught in Britain and North America'. In 2015, as part of Oxford University Press's celebration of University Press Week, Barry was asked to provide an account of the genesis and rationale of what was described as a 'ground-breaking and critically acclaimed undergraduate textbook'.
This orientation towards pedagogy was further evidenced in his next three books, English in Practice: In Pursuit of English Studies, Literature in Contexts and Reading Poetry, while he returned to literary theory with Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, which he co-edited with William Wellstead.
Barry has also pursued these interests in literary theory, pedagogy and English studies through his editorials in English over twenty years and articles in journals like the THE and P. N. Review.