Murray Evans

Dr. Murray Evans has taught at the University of Winnipeg since 1982. He was a Bye Fellow at Robinson College, Cambridge (1986–87) and a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Manitoba (2015). His research focuses on late medieval literature, exploring the intersections of religious and secular texts in Thomas Malory’s Arthurian works and Middle English romance collections (Rereading Middle English Romance, 1995). Studies of William Langland’s Piers Plowman—often described as sublime—led him to examine the sublime in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s later prose, particularly the Opus Maximum (Sublime Coleridge, 2012). He is currently writing a monograph on how Coleridge’s theory of the sublime informs contemporary thought in Adorno, Kristeva, Žižek, and Jameson.

Evans also pursues musical scholarship, analyzing and performing Romantic piano works by Chopin, Brahms, Scriabin, and Rachmaninoff. His work on the sublime investigates experiences that exceed ordinary perception—across literature, religion, art, and music—and explores how Coleridge’s blending of religious and secular perspectives continues to illuminate modern interpretations of the sublime.

• A.R.C.T in Piano Performance, Royal Conservatory of Music
• Honours B.A, English, Trent University
• M.A., Queen's University
• Ph.D., Queen's University

In press. “Sublime Discourse and Romantic Religion in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection,” for The Wordsworth Circle, ed. Marilyn Gaull.

Coleridge’s Sublime Later Prose: Kristeva, Adorno, Rancière. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

“Sublime Discourse and Romantic Religion in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection,” The Wordsworth Circle 47 (2016): 27–31.

“Coleridge’s Sublime Hermeneutics in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit,” The Coleridge Bulletin New Series 45 (Summer 2015): 39–44.

Sublime Coleridge: The Opus Maximum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

“Coleridge as Thinker: Logic and Opus Maximum,” in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 323–41.

“Reading ‘Will’ in Coleridge’s Opus Maximum: The Rhetoric of Transition and Repetition,” in Coleridge’s Assertion of Religion: Essays on the Opus Maximum, ed. Jeffrey Barbeau, Studies in Philosophical Theology (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006), 73–96.

“Coleridge's Sublime and Langland's Subject in the Pardon Scene of Piers Plowman,” in From Arabye to Engelond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui on His 75th Birthday, eds. A.E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland (Ottawa: Actempress, University of Ottawa, 1999), 155–74.

“Piers Plowman and the Sublime,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1997): 421–40.

Rereading Middle English Romance: Physical Layout, Decoration, and the Rhetoric of Composite Structure in Some Late Medieval Manuscript Collections. Montreal & Kingston; London; Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995.

“‘Making Strange’: The Narrator (?), the Ending (?), and Chaucer's Troilus,” reprinted in Critical Essays on Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' and His Major Early Poems, ed. C. David Benson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 164–75.

“C.S. Lewis' Narnia Books: The Reader in the Myth,” in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature, vol. 1, ed. Perry Nodelman (Children's Literature Association Publications, 1985), 132–45.

“Ordinatio and Narrative Links: The Impact of Malory's Tales as a ‘Hoole Book,’” in Studies in Malory, ed. James W. Spisak (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 29–52.

“Camelot or Corbenic?: Malory's New Blend of Secular and Religious Chivalry in the ‘Tale of the Holy Grail,’” English Studies in Canada 8 (1982): 249–61.

• Professor Emeritus
• Advancing Literacy Scholarship