My current research project involves various modes of English-to-English translation. Usually these translations involve gaps in time or space. I've written about verse paraphrases of the King James Bible, and I hope to write something soon about Wordsworth's modernizations of Chaucer. The translations in space that intrigue me move from regional dialects, Scots and Scottish English, and specialized jargons and sociolects into standard English. All these English-to-English translations seem to me forays into and out of a "sister tongue," a language that is not-quite-foreign but also not-quite-native. How did these forays shape the language of poetry in the nineteenth century and beyond?

I'm still working at the same time on a years-old project about poetic description of reality. My recent book Clare's Lyric was about the early nineteenth-century English poet John Clare as well as twentieth-century poets who looked to him as a model for a poetics that emphasized observation of the real world and accurate description on the page. Some of the questions I've been asking, which still puzzle and interest me, are: How do poets convince us that they have actually observed nature or social life? What are the poetic markers of accuracy and realism? How are those markers like and unlike those found in realist fiction, in botanical drawing, in paintings, and in other media? What sorts of meanings do poems about the world claim for themselves? Do those meanings inhere in the world, and/or are they a human invention?

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“On Clare and Lyric Song,” Cambridge Companion to John Clare (forthcoming).

“ 'Sea Songs Love Ballads &c &c &c’: John Clare and Vernacular Song,” Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, ed. Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford (Cham, Switzerland, 2020), 61-85.

“At Home in the Working Countryside: Clare’s Metaphysics of Agricultural Labor,” Romanticism 26.2 (July 2020): 128-38.

 “Clare’s manuscript translations of Byron and the Bible,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 58.4 (Autumn 2018): 877-97.

"John Clare's Speaking Voices: Dialect, Orality, and the Intermedial Poetic Text," Essays in Romanticism 25.1 (2018): 85-100.

"Exemplary figures in Clare's descriptive poems," John Clare Society Journal 36 (2017): 57-66.

"Geoffrey Grigson's Embrace of Influence," Review of English Studies 68.287 (2017): 968-85.

Clare's Lyric: John Clare and Three Modern Poets (Oxford UP, 2014). The three modern poets are Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery.

“Minds and Bodies,” Oxford Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

“On the Publication of John Clare’s The Rural Muse, 1835,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga (2012), at http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=stephanie-kuduk-weiner-on-the-publication-of-john-clares-the-rural-muse

"Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne's Late Poetry," in A.C. Swinburne and the Singing Word, ed. Yisrael Levin (Ashgate, 2010).

"Listening with John Clare," Studies in Romanticism (Fall 2009).

"Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson," Nineteenth-Century Literature 60: 4 (March 2006): 481-509.

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

"Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies," Victorian Poetry 41: 4 (Winter 2003): 513-18.

"A Sword of a Song': Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics," Victorian Studies 43: 2 (Winter 2001): 253-79.

"Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides," Victorian Poetry 39: 2 (Summer 2001): 165-86.