Murray Edwards College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge
CB3 0DF
United Kingdom
Charlotte's primary focus is German literature and thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her first book, The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing (2014), examined the role of memory in shaping Goethe's last works, and argued that old age can be a time of great insight and creativity. She is currently involved in a number of projects which seek to address negative perceptions of ageing in our own society.
Charlotte is currently working on a study of the relationship between poetry and movement: of how poetry moves, and moves in us. Her methodology is partly inspired by cognitive approaches to literature, a rapidly expanding field of literary criticism.
Dr Lee welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her interests.
Charlotte lectures and supervises on 18th and 19th-century literature and thought and 20th-century poetry.
18th and 19th-century German literature
Goethe
Cognitive approaches to literature
Ageing / cultural gerontology
Monograph
The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing (Oxford: Legenda, 2014).
Edited volume
German Life and Letters, vol. 70.4 (2017), special number: ‘Embodied Cognition around 1800’, co-edited with Katharina Engler-Coldren and Lore Knapp.
Essays and articles
‘The delicate flux of world and spirit: Barthold Heinrich Brockes and distributed cognition’, in Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, ed. by Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau and Michael Wheeler; vol. 3 of The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
‘A meeting of minds? The dialogue between voices female and male in the poems of the West-östlicher Divan’, in Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750-1850, ed. by Laura Deiulio and John Lyon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 209-226.
‘Cognition in Action: Goethe’s Märchen’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 87.3 (2018), 121-130.
‘Movement and embodiment in Klopstock and Goethe’, German Life and Letters 70.4 (2017), 508-17.
‘Johann Peter Hebel and the dynamics of hope’, German Life and Letters 68.4 (2015), 517-28.
‘Sie ist so ferne ihm, und doch so nah: reciprocity and exchange in the lyric poetry of Sophie Mereau’, Publications of the English Goethe Society 84 (2015), 63-75.
‘Home and homelessness in works by Novalis, Dorothea Schlegel, and Tieck’, Modern Language Review 109.4 (2014), 1030-47.
‘Im flüßgen Element hin und wieder schweifen: development and return in Goethe’s poetry and Hegel’s philosophy’, Goethe Yearbook 20 (2013), 167-77.
‘Mignon and the idea of the secret’, chapter in The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature. Essays in honour of Nicholas Boyle, ed. by John Walker (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), pp. 61-69.
‘Durch Wunderkraft erschienen: affinities between Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Modern Language Review 107.1 (2012), 198-210, reprinted in German in British-deutscher Literaturtransfer 1756-1832, ed. by Lore Knapp and Eike Kronshage (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 193-200.
‘Wenn ich leben soll, so sei es mit dir! The relationship between father and son in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre’, German Life and Letters 64.4 (2011), 489-500.
‘Fausts Credo in wechselnder Beleuchtung’, Jahrburch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (2011), 8-22.
Book reviews for the Modern Language Review and the Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies.
