Villanova University

Faculty Member, Humanities

About

James Matthew Wilson is the author of many essays on philosophical theology and literature, with a particular focus on the relation of artistic form and metaphysics.  His long-term scholarly project is to provide a complete account of the influence of Classical, Scholastic, and neo-Scholastic thought on modern Irish, British, and American literature.  Drawing on such research, his non-scholarly writing seeks to bring the wisdom of the past into conversation with contemporary literature, art, and life.  This branch of his work has considered such topics as the nature of the intellectual life, the nature and knowledge of beauty, and the value and rules of prosody, among others.

He teaches in the Humanities Department at Villanova University, where his courses include "The Return to the Real," a close study of T.S. Eliot and Jacques Maritain whose aim is to recover a robust conception of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty as aspects of reality and the ends of human life; "Irish Identities," which explores modern Irish literature in terms of its use of religious and national identity as means of inquiry into the nature of the good life; and "The Poetry of Meditation," in which is studied the deep interconnection between the Christian-Platonic contemplative tradition and the rise of the modern lyric (with its sundry conventions).

Wilson is a poet, and critic of contemporary poetry, having published several dozen poems in journals in addition to a chapbook, "Four Verse Letters" (2010).  His "Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction" is forthcoming in 2012, and he is at work on "T.S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and the Return to the Real."  In the near future, he intends to complete two further short books, "The Vision of the Soul" and "A Ruined Colonnade," excerpts from which have appeared in a number of journals and magazines.

He is also an editor of Front Porch Republic (frontporchrepublic.com), and his essays on art, literature, politics, ethics, and theology appear there and in a variety of other print and internet journals.

Under the "Papers" category on this page may be found miscellaneous reviews and other publications that are not under copyright and are unlikely to appear in an upcoming book project.