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CHAP I
I WISH either my father or my mother,
or indeed both of them, as they
were in duty both equally bound to it,
had minded what they were about when
they begot me; had they duly consider'd
how much depended upon what they
were then doing; -- that not only the
production of a rational Being was con-
cern'd in it, but that possibly the happy
formation and temperature of his body,
perhaps his genius and the very cast of
his mind ; -- and, for aught they knew
to the contrary, even the fortunes of his
whole house might take their turn from
the humours and dispositions which were
then uppermost : ---- Had they duly
weighed and considered all this, and
proceeded accordingly, ---- I am verily
persuaded I should have made a quite
different figure in the world, from that,
in which the reader is likely to see me. --
Believe me, good folks, this is not so
inconsiderable a thing as many of you
may think it ; -- you have all, I dare say,
heard of the animal spirits, as how they are
transfused from father to son, &c. &c.--
and a great deal to that purpose : -- Well,
you may take my word, that nine parts
in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense,
his successes and miscarriages in this
world depend upon their motions and
activity, and the different tracks and trains
you put them into ; so that when they
are once set a-going, whether right or
wrong, 'tis not a halfpenny matter, -- away
they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and
by treading the same steps over and over
again, they presently make a road of it,
as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk,
which, when they are once used to, the
Devil himself sometimes shall not be able
to drive them off it.
Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have
you not forgot to wind up the clock ? ----
Good G -- ! cried my father, making an
exclamation, but taking care to moderate
his voice at the same time, ---- Did ever
woman, since the creation of the world, in-
terrupt a man with such a silly question?
Pray, what was your father saying ? ----
Nothing.
C H A P. II
---- Then, positively, there is nothing
in the question, that I can see, either good
or bad. ---- Then let me tell you, Sir,
it was a very unseasonable question at
least, -- because it scattered and dispersed
the animal spirits, whose business it was
to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand
with the HOMUNCULUS, and con-
ducted him safe to the place destined for
his reception.
The HOMUNCULUS, Sir, in how-ever
low and ludicrous a light he may appear,
in this age of levity, to the eye of folly
or prejudice ; -- to the eye of reason in
scientifick research, he stands confess'd --
a BEING guarded and circumscribed with
rights : ---- The minutest philosophers,
who, by the bye, have the most enlarged
understandings, (their souls being in-
versely as their enquiries) shew us incon-
testably, That the HOMUNCULUS is
created by the same hand, -- engender'd
in the same course of nature,-- endowed
with the same loco-motive powers and
faculties with us : ---- That he consists,
as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins,
arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartileges,
bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals,
humours, and articulations ; ---- is a Be-
ing of as much activity, ---- and, in all
senses of the word, as much and as truly
our fellow-creature as my Lord Chancel-
lor of England. -- He may be benefited,
he may be injured, -- he may obtain re-
dress ; -- in a word, he has all the claims
and rights of humanity, which Tully,
Puffendorff, or the best ethick writers
allow to arise out of that state and rela-
tion.
Now, dear Sir, what if any accident
had befallen him in his way alone ? ----
or that, thro' terror of it, natural to so
young a traveller, my little gentleman
had got to his journey's end miserably
spent ; ---- his muscular strength and
virility worn down to a thread ; -- his
own animal spirits ruffled beyond de-
scription, -- and that in this sad disorder'd
state of nerves, he had laid down a prey
to sudden starts, or a series of melan-
choly dreams and fancies for nine long,
long months together . ---- I tremble to
think what a foundation had been laid
for a thousand weaknesses both of body
and mind, which no skill of the physi-
cian or the philosopher could ever after-
wards have set thoroughly to rights.
C H A P. III.
TO my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I
stand indebted for the preceding
anecdote, to whom my father, who was
an excellent natural philosopher, and
much given to close reasoning upon the
smallest matters, had oft, and heavily,
complain'd of the injury ; but once more
particularly, as my uncle Toby well re-
member'd, upon his observing a most
unaccountable obliquity, (as he call'd it)
in my manner of setting up my top, and
justifying the principles upon which I
had done it, -- the old gentleman shook
his head, and in a tone more expressive
by half of sorrow than reproach, -- he said
his heart all along foreboded, and he
saw it verified in this, and from a thou-
sand other observations he had made up-
on me, That I should neither think nor
act like any other man's child : ---- But
alas ! continued he, shaking his head a
second time, and wiping away a tear
which was trickling down his cheeks,
My Tristram's misfortunes began nine months
before ever he came into the world.
---- My mother, who was sitting by,
look'd up, -- but she knew no more than
her backside what my father meant, -- but
my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had been
often informed of the affair, -- understood
him very well.
C H A P. IV.
I KNOW there are readers in the world,
as well as many other good people
in it, who are no readers at all, -- who
find themselves ill at ease, unless they are
let into the whole secret from first to last,
of every thing which concerns you.
It is in pure compliance with this hu-
mour of theirs, and from a backwardness
in my nature to disappoint any one soul
living, that I have been so very particu-
lar already. As my life and opinions are
likely to make some noise in the world,
and, if I conjecture right, will take in all
ranks, professions, and denominations of
men whatever, -- be no less read than the
Pilgrim's Progress itself -- and, in the end,
prove the very thing which Montaigne
dreaded his essays should turn out, that
is, a book for a parlour-window ; -- I find
it necessary to consult every one a little
in his turn ; and therefore must beg par-
don for going on a little further in the
same way : For which cause, right glad
I am, that I have begun the history of
myself in the way I have done ; and
that I am able to go on tracing every
thing in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo.
Horace, I know, does not recommend
this fashion altogether : But that gentle-
man is speaking only of an epic poem or
a tragedy ; -- (I forget which) -- besides,
if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's
pardon ; -- for in writing what I have set
about, I shall confine myself neither to
his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever
lived.
To such, however, as do not choose to
go so far back into these things, I can
give no better advice, than that they
skip over the remaining part of this
Chapter ; for I declare before hand, 'tis
wrote only for the curious and inquisi-
tive.
---------- Shut the door. --------
I was begot in the night, betwixt the first
Sunday and the first Monday in the month
of March, in the year of our Lord one
thousand seven hundred and eighteen.
I am positive I was. -- But how I came
to be so very particular in my account
of a thing which happened before I was
born, is owing to another small anecdote
known only in our own family, but now
made public for the better clearing up
this point.
My father, you must know, who was
originally a Turky merchant, but had left
off business for some years, in order to
retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate
in the county of ------ , was, I believe,
one of the most regular men in every
thing he did, whether 'twas matter of
business, or matter of amusement, that
ever lived. As a small specimen of this
extreme exactness of his, to which he
was in truth a slave, -- he had made it a
rule for many years of his life, -- on the
first Sunday night of every month through-
out the whole year, -- as certain as ever
the Sunday night came, ---- to wind up a
large house-clock which we had standing
upon the back-stairs head, with his own
hands: -- And being somewhere between
fifty and sixty years of age, at the time I
have been speaking of,-- he had likewise
gradually brought some other little fa-
mily concernments to the same period,
in order, as he would often say to my
uncle Toby, to get them all out of the
way at one time, and be no more plagued
and pester'd with them the rest of the
month.
It was attended but with one misfor-
tune, which, in a great measure, fell upon
myself, and the effects of which I fear
I shall carry with me to my grave ;
namely, that, from an unhappy association
of ideas which have no connection in na-
ture, it so fell out at length, that my
poor mother could never hear the said
clock wound up, -- but the thoughts of
some other things unavoidably popp'd
into her head, -- & vice versâ : -- which
strange combination of ideas, the saga-
cious Locke, who certainly understood
the nature of these things better than
most men, affirms to have produced
more wry actions than all other sources
of prejudice whatsoever.
But this by the bye.
Now it appears, by a memorandum in
my father's pocket-book, which now lies
upon the table, ``That on Lady-Day,
which was on the 25th of the same month
in which I date my geniture, -- my father
set out upon his journey to London with
my eldest brother Bobby, to fix him at
Westminster school ;" and, as it appears
from the same authority, ``That he did
not get down to his wife and family till
the second week in May following," -- it
brings the thing almost to a certainty.
However, what follows in the beginning
of the next chapter puts it beyond all
possibility of doubt.
------ But pray, Sir, What was your
father doing all December, -- January, and
February ? ---- Why, Madam, -- he was
all that time afflicted with a Sciatica.
C H A P. V.
ON the fifth day of November, 1718,
which to the æra fixed on, was as
near nine kalendar months as any husband
could in reason have expected, -- was I
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought
forth into this scurvy and disasterous
world of ours. -- I wish I had been born
in the Moon, or in any of the planets,
(except Jupiter or Saturn, because I never
could bear cold weather) for it could
not well have fared worse with me in
any of them (tho' I will not answer for
Venus) than it has in this vile, dirty pla-
net of ours, -- which o' my conscience,
with reverence be it spoken, I take to be
made up of the shreds and clippings of
the rest ; ---- not but the planet is well
enough, provided a man could be born
in it to a great title or to a great estate;
or could any how contrive to be called
up to publick charges, and employments
of dignity or power ; -- but that is not
my case ; ---- and therefore every man
will speak of the fair as his own market
has gone in it ; -- for which cause I affirm
it over again to be one of the vilest
worlds that ever was made ; -- for I can
truly say, that from the first hour I drew
my breath in it, to this, that I can now
scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got
in scating against the wind in Flanders; --
I have been the continual sport of what
the world calls Fortune ; and though I
will not wrong her by saying, She has
ever made me feel the weight of any
great or signal evil ; -- yet with all the
good temper in the world, I affirm it of
her, That in every stage of my life, and
at every turn and corner where she could
get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess
has pelted me with a set of as pitiful
misadventures and cross accidents as ever
small HERO sustained.
C H A P. VI.
IN the beginning of the last chapter,
I inform'd you exactly when I was
born ; -- but I did not inform you, how.
No; that particular was reserved entirely
for a chapter by itself ; -- besides, Sir, as
you and I are in a manner perfect stran-
gers to each other, it would not have been
proper to have let you into too many
circumstances relating to myself all at
once. -- You must have a little patience.
I have undertaken, you see, to write not
only my life, but my opinions also ; ho-
ping and expecting that your knowledge
of my character, and of what kind of a
mortal I am, by the one, would give you
a better relish for the other : As you
proceed further with me, the slight ac-
quaintance which is now beginning be-
twixt us, will grow into familiarity ; and
that, unless one of us is in fault, will
terminate in friendship. ---- O diem præ-
clarum ! ---- then nothing which has
touched me will be thought trifling in
its nature, or tedious in its telling.
Therefore, my dear friend and compa-
nion, if you should think me somewhat
sparing of my narrative on my first setting
out, -- bear with me, -- and let me go on,
and tell my story my own way : ---- or
if I should seem now and then to trifle
upon the road, ---- or should sometimes
put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a
moment or two as we pass along, -- don't
fly off, -- but rather courteously give me
credit for a little more wisdom than ap-
pears upon my outside ; -- and as we jogg
on, either laugh with me, or at me, or
in short, do any thing, ---- only keep your
temper.
C H A P. VII.
IN the same village where my father
and my mother dwelt, dwelt also a
thin, upright, motherly, notable, good
old body of a midwife, who, with the
help of a little plain good sense, and
some years full employment in her busi-
ness, in which she had all along trusted
little to her own efforts, and a great deal
to those of dame nature, -- had acquired,
in her way, no small degree of reputati-
on in the world; -- by which word world,
need I in this place inform your worship,
that I would be understood to mean no
more of it, than a small circle described
upon the circle of the great world, of
four English miles diameter, or there-
abouts, of which the cottage where the
good old woman lived, is supposed to be
the centre. ---- She had been left, it
seems, a widow in great distress, with
three or four small children, in her forty-
seventh year ; and as she was at that time
a person of decent carriage, -- grave de-
portment, ---- a woman moreover of few
words, and withall an object of compas-
sion, whose distress and silence under it
call'd out the louder for a friendly lift :
the wife of the parson of the parish was
touch'd with pity ; and having often la-
mented an inconvenience, to which her
husband's flock had for many years been
exposed, inasmuch, as there was no such
thing as a midwife, of any kind or
degree to be got at, let the case have been
never so urgent, within less than six or
seven long miles riding ; which said seven
long miles in dark nights and dismal
roads, the country thereabouts being no-
thing but a deep clay, was almost equal to
fourteen; and that in effect was sometimes
next to having no midwife at all ; it came
into her head, that it would be doing as
seasonable a kindness to the whole parish,
as to the poor creature herself, to get
her a little instructed in some of the plain
principles of the business, in order to set
her up in it. As no woman thereabouts
was better qualified to execute the plan
she had formed than herself, the Gentle-
woman very charitably undertook it ; and
having great influence over the female
part of the parish, she found no difficulty
in effecting it to the utmost of her wishes.
In truth, the parson join'd his interest
with his wife's in the whole affair ; and
in order to do things as they should be,
and give the poor soul as good a title by
law to practise, as his wife had given by
institution, ---- he chearfully paid the
fees for the ordinaries licence himself,
amounting, in the whole, to the sum of
eighteen shillings and fourpence ; so that,
betwixt them both, the good woman
was fully invested in the real and corpo-
ral possession of her office, together with
all its rights, members, and appurtenances
whatsoever.
These last words, you must know,
were not according to the old form in
which such licences, faculties, and powers
usually ran, which in like cases had here-
tofore been granted to the sisterhood.
But it was according to a neat Formula
of Didius his own devising, who having
a particular turn for taking to pieces,
and new framing over again, all kind of
instruments in that way, not only hit
upon this dainty amendment, but coax'd
many of the old licensed matrons in the
neighbourhood, to open their faculties
afresh, in order to have this whim-wham
of his inserted.
I own I never could envy Didius in
these kinds of fancies of his : -- But every
man to his own taste. -- Did not Dr. Ku-
nastrokius, that great man, at his leisure
hours, take the greatest delight imagina-
ble in combing of asses tails, and plucking
the dead hairs out with his teeth, though
he had tweezers always in his pocket ?
Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not
the wisest of men in all ages, not except-
ing Solomon himself, -- have they not had
their HOBBY-HORSES ; -- their running
horses, -- their coins and their cockle-
shells, their drums and their trumpets,
their fiddles, their pallets, ---- their mag-
gots and their butterflies ? -- and so long
as a man rides his HOBBY-HORSE peace-
ably and quietly along the King's high-
way, and neither compels you or me to
get up behind him, ---- pray, Sir, what
have either you or I to do with it ?
C H A P. VIII.
-- De gustibus non est disputandum; -- that
is, there is no disputing against HOBBY-
HORSES ; and, for my part, I seldom do ;
nor could I with any sort of grace, had
I been an enemy to them at the bot-
tom ; for happening, at certain intervals
and changes of the Moon, to be both
fiddler and painter, according as the fly
stings : -- Be it known to you, that I
keep a couple of pads myself, upon
which, in their turns, (nor do I care who
knows it) I frequently ride out and take
the air ; -- tho' sometimes, to my shame
be it spoken, I take somewhat longer
journies than what a wise man would
think altogether right. ---- But the truth
is, -- I am not a wise man ; ---- and be-
sides am a mortal of so little consequence
in the world, it is not much matter what
I do ; so I seldom fret or fume at all
about it : Nor does it much disturb my
rest when I see such great Lords and tall
Personages as hereafter follow ; -- such,
for instance, as my Lord A, B, C, D, E,
F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, and
so on, all of a row, mounted upon their
several horses ; -- some with large stirrups,
getting on in a more grave and sober
pace ; ---- others on the contrary, tuck'd
up to their very chins, with whips across
their mouths, scouring and scampering
it away like so many little party-colour'd
devils astride a mortgage, ---- and as if
some of them were resolved to break
their necks. -- So much the better -- say
I to myself ; -- for in case the worst should
happen, the world will make a shift to do
excellently well without them ; -- and
for the rest, ---- why, ---- God speed
them, ---- e'en let them ride on without
any opposition from me ; for were their lord-
ships unhorsed this very night, ---- 'tis
ten to one but that many of them would
be worse mounted by one half before to-
morrow morning.
Not one of these instances therefore
can be said to break in upon my rest. --
But there is an instance, which I own puts
me off my guard, and that is, when I see
one born for great actions, and, what is
still more for his honour, whose nature
ever inclines him to good ones ; ----
when I behold such a one, my Lord, like
yourself, whose principles and conduct
are as generous and noble as his blood,
and whom, for that reason, a corrupt
world cannot spare one moment; -- when
I see such a one, my Lord, mounted,
though it is but for a minute beyond the
time which my love to my country has
prescribed to him, and my zeal for his
glory wishes, -- then, my Lord, I cease
to be a philosopher, and in the first
transport of an honest impatience, I wish
the HOBBY-HORSE, with all his frater-
nity, at the Devil.
``My Lord,
``I Maintain this to be a dedication,
`` notwithstanding its singularity in
``the three great essentials of matter,
``form, and place : I beg, therefore, you
``will accept it as such, and that you will
``permit me to lay it, with the most re-
``spectful humility, at your Lordship's
``feet, -- when you are upon them, --
``which you can be when you please ; --
``and that is, my Lord, when ever there
``is occasion for it, and I will add, to the
``best purposes too. I have the honour
``to be,
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most obedient,
and most devoted,
and most humble servant,
TRISTRAM SHANDY.''
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GRADUATE FACULTY
Marshall Alcorn; alcornma@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Texas) Rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, critical theory
Marshall Alcorn is Professor of English and Human Sciences at George Washington University and also a Research Candidate with the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. In addition to many articles he has published two books and three edited collections. His first book, Narcissism and the Literary Libido, uses reader-response and psychoanalytic theory to examine the emotional power of literature. His second book, Changing the Subject in English Class, won the W. Ross Winterowd Award for the best book of the year in Composition Theory. His research interests are in psychoanalytic theory, rhetoric and ideology. From 1970 to 1972 he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer to India.
"Slavoj Zizek and the Jouissance of Doubleclutch Think." in Cultures of Desire: Zizek, Politics, and Theory. Ed. Gustavo Guerrero (Forthcoming, The Other Press).
"Laplanche." in The Columbia History of Twentieth Century French Thought. Lawrence D. Kritzman, Ed. Columbia University Press, (forthcoming, 2004).
"Getting More Bang for Your Buck: The Erotics and Labor of Policing Theory,” JAC,23 (2003): 876-884.
Changing the Subject in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desire. Southern Illinois U.P., 2002.
"Anxiety and Fragmentation in Panic: A Lacaninan Perspective," in Panic, Origins, Insights, Treatment. Ed. Brooke Warner. Berkeley : North Atlantic Books, 2002.
Patricia P. Chu; pattychu@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Cornell University) Asian American literature and cultural studies, 19th-century British literature, women's writing, contemporary fiction
Professor Chu studied British Victorian literature and Asian American literature at Cornell University; she now publishes primarily in the field of Asian American literature, which she considers in terms of genre, gender, theories of subjectivity and nationalism, and Asian American history and culture. In Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), she considers the vexed relationships among gender, authorship, race, and citizenship in Asian American coming of age narratives. In 1999 she was invited to be a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore. Currently Professor Chu teaches courses in women’s autobiography, contemporary American literature, Asian American literature, ethnicity and place, and Asian American and Asian diasporan narratives of “return” to Asian homelands.
"'A Flame Against a Sleeping Lake of Petrol': Sympathy and the Expatriate Witness in Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost." in Unnatural Acts: The Aesthetic in Asian American Literary Discourse. Ed. Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee. Philadelphia: Temple UP. Forthcoming.
"'To Hide Her True Self': Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman." in Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen. Ed. Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 61-83..
"'The Invisible World the Emigrants Built': Cultural Self-Inscription and the Anti-Romantic Plots of The Woman Warrior." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2:1 (Spring 1992): 96-115. www.UTPJournals.com. Electronic reprint from Diaspora.
"Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." in The MLA Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. Ed. Stephen H. Sumida and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. 86-96.
Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Reviewed in American Literature, Choice, Journal of Asian American Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Western American Literature.
Jeffrey Cohen; jjcohen@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Harvard University) Medieval literature
Professor Cohen's main focus is on the mingling of cultures in the medieval British archipelago. He is interested in identity, race, violence, monstrosity, Jews, the body, and related topics, especially in the period 500-1400.
Stories of Blood: Monsters, Jews and Race in Medieval Britain (monograph in progress)
Medieval Identity Machines. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 2003.
Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. University of Minnesota Press, Medieval Cultures series, 1999.
Thinking the Limits of the Body. State University of New York Press, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art series, 2002. Editor, with Gail Weiss.
The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Palgrave, New Middle Ages series, 2000. Editor.
Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Garland Publishing, New Middle Ages series, 1997. Editor, with Bonnie Wheeler.
Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press, Visible Evidence series, 1996. Editor.
"The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich." Speculum 78 (2004): 26-65.
"On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.1 (2001):111-44.
Patrick Cook; pcook@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) Milton, Renaissance literature
Professor Cook’s primary area of research is Milton , an interest that also leads him to focus on English and continental Renaissance literature, early Christian studies, and classical literatures. In addition, he publishes reviews regularly concerning film and media studies. His current book projects are a study of the evolving tradition of Hamlet on film and an analysis of Milton’s Paradise Regained as a radical experiment in manipulating readers’ expectations.
“The Ecloga Theoduli: A Carolingian Textbook for Cultural Literacy.” in Medieval Childrens’s Literature, ed. Daniel T. Kline, Garland , 2003.
“Teaching the Aeneid with Milton ’s Paradise Lost.” Approaches to Teaching Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. William S. Anderson and Lorina Quartarone. Modern Language Association of America , 2002.
“Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Description of Cooke-ham’ as Devotional Lyric.” Discovering and Recovering the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Eugene Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson. Dusquesne UP, 2001.
“Eroticism and the Integral Self: Milton ’s Poems: 1645 and the Italian Pastoral Tradition.” The Comparatist, 2000.
Milton , Spenser and the Epic Tradition . Ashgate, 1996.
Kavita Daiya; kdaiya@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Chicago) Colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, transnational feminisms, globalization, gender and sexuality, South Asian American literature and culture, twentieth-century British literature, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial film and visual culture, modern Indian history.
Kavita Daiya's primary research and teaching interests lie in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Gender Studies, Globalization, Critical Theory, South Asian American Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Film and Visual Culture.
Her publications explore questions of nationalism, migration, globalization, race and ethnicity, gender, postcolonial history, and diaspora. She is currently working on her book Violent Belongings: Gender and Ethnicity, Migration and Citizenship in Postcoloniality, about the transnational narration of ethnic, gendered violence and migration in postcolonial literature and culture. Professor Daiya has published several articles, and has presented her work at the MLA, AAS, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley, among other spaces. She has also been a Research Fellow at the Globalization Project at the University of Chicago.
"'Honourable Resolutions:' Gendered Violence, Ethnicity and the Nation," Alternatives: Global Local Political vol. 27, no. 2 April-June 2002.
"'No Home But in Memory:' Migrant Bodies and Belongings, Globalization and Nationalism in Amitav Ghosh's Novels," in Amitav Ghosh: Critical Essays, Brinda Bose, ed., (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2002)
Holly Dugan; hdugan@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Michigan) Histories of the Body & the Senses; Early Modern Cultural Studies; Feminist, Materialist, and Queer Theory; Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Literature; Early English Drama; Early Modern Gender & Sexualities; New World Discovery Narratives
Professor Dugan teaches sixteenth-century literature and early English drama. Her research and teaching interests explore relationships between history, literature, and material culture. Her scholarship focuses on questions of gender, sexuality, and the boundaries of the body in early modern England. She is currently working on a book-length project that examines the ephemeral history of perfume and the role of smell in early modern culture.
Maria Frawley; mfrawley@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Delaware) 19th-Century British Literature
Professor Frawley works primarily on nineteenth-century women writers, the periodical press, and nonfiction of the period. Her most recent research has focused on the intersections between literary and medical history in the nineteenth century. She is currently studying identity theft and the figure of the impostor in Victorian England and has ancillary projects on Dickens and medical photography and Jane Austen’s vocabulary.
Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Life in the Sickroom, by Harriet Martineau. A Broadview Edition, Broadview Press, 2003.
"Behind the Scenes of History: Harriet Martineau and The Lowell Offering". Victorian Periodicals Review, forthcoming
"Harriet Martineau, Health, and Journalism,” Women’s Writing 9,3 (2002): 433-44.
Jennifer M. Green-Lewis; jmgl@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, literature and the visual arts
Jennifer Green-Lewis is Associate Professor of English at the George Washington University. She teaches nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature, and is particularly interested in courses that explore the relationship between literary and visual cultures, as well as the role of aesthetics in literary criticism. Her scholarship reflects those interests: she is the author of numerous articles on photography and nineteenth-century visual culture, as well as a book, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Cornell University Press, 1996). She is currently working on two long projects; one, on beauty and the study of literature (with faculty member Margaret Soltan); the other on Victorian pictorial photography.
“Not Fading Away: Photography in the Age of Oblivion.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 2001. Vol. 22. 559-585
“At Home in the Nineteenth Century: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Will to Authenticity.” Victorian Afterlife: Contemporary Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Eds. John Kucich and Dianne Sadoff. Minneapolis/London: U of Minnesota P, 2000; 29-48. Reprinted with permission in Nineteenth-century Contexts, 2000. Vol. 22, pp. 51-75.
Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1996.
"Picturing England: On Photography, Landscape, and the End(s) of Imperial Culture.” Genre, Summer 1996. 29: 1 & 2. 33-63.
"'The right thing in the right place': P. H. Emerson and the Picturesque Photograph."
Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Ed. Carol Christ and John O. Jordan. Berkeley, CA.: U of California P, 1995. 88-110.
"Signs of the Things Taken: Testimony, Subjectivity, and the Nineteenth-century Mug Shot." Victorian Literature and Culture. 23. 1993. 19-50.
"Outside the Frame: The Photographer in Victorian Fiction." Victorians Institute Journal. 19. 1991. 111-140.
"Stories at an Exhibition: Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Photographic Documentary." Journal of Narrative Technique. 20: 2, 1990. 147-166.
"Landscape, Loss, and Sexuality: Three Recent Books on Victorian Photography.” Victorian Studies. Spring 1996. 391-404.
Jonathan Gil Harris; jgharris@gwu.edu
(D. Phil., University of Sussex, England) Shakespeare, Renaissance Lit, cultural studies, early modern mercantilism, discourses of pathology, theories of history, historiography and historicism
Professor Harris's specialization is the literature and culture of early modern England, particularly the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His books and essays are concerned with things in motion: specifically, contagious diseases, foreign commodities, Shakespearean relics, and movable stage properties. Professor Harris's next book project, Reworking Material Culture in Shakespeare's England, considers the palimpsest as a model for both materiality and historiography in the Renaissance and the present, and spans the work of early modern writers such as Shakespeare, Robert Wilson, John Stow and Margaret Cavendish, and contemporary theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh. He is on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly and The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal.
Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004
Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, co-edited with Natasha Korda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
"Rematerializing Shakespeare's Intertheatricality: The Occidental-Oriental Halimpsest." In Bryan Reynolds and William L. West (eds.).
Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation in Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 (forthcoming)
"All Swell That End Swell: Dropsy, Phantom Pregnancy, and the Sound of Deconception in All's Well That Ends Well," Renaissance Drama 36 (2005, forthcoming)
"[Po]X Marks the Spot: How to 'Read' 'Early Modern' 'Syphilis." In Kevin Siena (ed.). Sins of the Flesh: Responses to Sexually Transmitted Disease in Renaissance Europe. Toronto: Center for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2005
"Greenblatt's X-Files." In Peter C. Herman (ed.). Historicizing Theory. Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2003
"Afterword: Walk Like an Egyptian," in Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
"Atomic Shakespeare," Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002) 47-54
"Shakespeare's Hair: Staging the Object of Material Culture," Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 479-91
Jennifer James; jcj@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Maryland) African American Literature
Professor James’s primary area of research is the 19th century African American novel, a genre she uses to explore the representations (and intersections) of gender, race, violence, and the strategies African American writers of that period use to disseminate alternative versions of black “history” in the realm of fiction.
Her book project, Sable Hands" and National Arms, examines the black American literature of war (poetry, autobiography, histories and fiction) about the Civil War, The Spanish-Cuban American War, the Philippine-American War, WWI and WWII— the wars before the military was desegregated in 1948.
"'Civil' War Wounds: William Wells Brown, Violence and The Domestic Narrative" Forthcoming: The African American Review.
"'Every body has its pose': Black Masculinity and the Body in Gwendolyn Brooks’ War Sonnets," Accepted for proposed anthology on Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnets.
"African American Literature of War: The Civil War-Vietnam," in An American Encyclopedia of War Literature, eds. Mark Graves and Philip K. Jason. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.
"Antebellum Addy: Slave Dolls and the Commodification of Historical Memory," The Washington City Paper, January 17, 1994.
Antonio López; amlopez@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Rutgers University) U.S. Latino literature, Caribbean literature, twentieth-century U.S. literature, cultural theory of the Americas.
Professor López’s primary area of research and teaching is twentieth-century Latino literature, with a particular interest in the transnational Latino-Caribbean cultures of the U.S. His current book-length project examines the relations between diaspora, racial identity, and national culture in Cuban and Cuban-American fiction, autobiography, and documentary film.
David McAleavey; cj@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Cornell University) 20th century U.S. poetry
David McAleavey directs the Department's all-undergraduate Creative Writing Program, and much of his teaching is in that area, including what he does through the Summer Distance Learning Initiative, a program for which he is also the recently-appointed Faculty Liaison. For many years his primary writing and publishing activity has been poetry; he has had poems from his forthcoming fifth book of poems, Huge Haiku (Chax Press, 2004) in Poetry and Ploughshares, among other journals. His current manuscript in progress, tentatively titled Anthology: Poems After the Canon, involves poems which appropriate the titles of famous poems; a few of these have appeared on the Web (www.poetryfish.com) and will soon appear in print (Denver Quarterly and elsewhere).
His dissertation (Cornell U., 1975) was a study of the poetry of George Oppen; some of that material and other work on Oppen has appeared in print. His recent literature courses include the undergraduate two-semester survey of American poetry; a Dean's Seminar for freshmen (S '04) on writing brief prose forms; and a Special Topics course (F 03), "Recent American Poetry." He last led a graduate seminar on Twentieth Century American Poetry in the mid-1990's, and directed a dissertation (by Colin Clarke) on mid-century American poets who experienced confinement.
Robert McRuer; rmcruer@gwu.edu
(Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Cultural studies, critical theory, lgbt/queer studies, disability studies, 20th-century American studies
Professor McRuer's research centers on queer studies, disability studies, and the intersections of the two. His current book project, De-Composing Bodies: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, examines both the cultural construction of compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness and the cultures of resistance shaped by queer and disabled writers and activists. The collection he edited with Abby L. Wilkerson, Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, was chosen as the 2003 Best Special Issue by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). Professor McRuer was also awarded the 2002 Passing-the-Torch Award, which is given annually by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) to an emerging scholar in queer studies.
"Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies". Special Double
Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Guest Editor with Abby L. Wilkerson. Duke University Press, 2003.
"Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence." Disability
Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson et al. MLA Publications, 2002.
"Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability
Studies." Journal of Medical Humanities, 2002.
"Gay Gatherings: Reimagining the Counterculture." Imagine Nation: The
American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Ed. Peter Braunstein and
Michael William Doyle. Routledge, 2002.
The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York University Press, 1997.
James A. Miller; jam@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo) African American and American literature, literary history
Professor Miller is primarily interested in interdisciplinary approaches to African American and American Literature, with particular emphasis upon the intersections between history, social and political movements, and literary production.
His forthcoming book, Moments of Scottsboro: The Scottboro Case and American Culture, 1931-2001, examines literary and cultural representations of the Scottsboro case over a seventy-year span of American Life. The editor of The Richard Wright Newsletter, he is also at work on Richard Wright: A Documentary Biography.
“Black Washington and the New Negro Renaissance.” in Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities, ed. by John J. Czaplicka and Blair A. Ruble. Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
(With Susan D. Pennybacker and Eve Rosenhaft). “Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934.” American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2(April 2001)
Harlem : The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
Approaches to Teaching Wright’s Native Son, (ed.)
Kim Moreland; moreland@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Brown University) Late 19th- and 20th-century American literature
Professor Moreland is primarily interested in American literature 1870-1960, with special interest in literary realism, naturalism, and modernism. She has focused much of her research on the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. She served as Program Director for the F. Scott Fitzgerald International Conference in Vevey, Switzerland (2004), where she also presented a paper on “The Great Gatsby and Daisy Miller.” She is a member of the editorial board of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and she serves as a reader of manuscripts and as a reviewer for the Hemingway Review.
Professor Moreland has a lengthy article, “Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Up Bridges in The Fifth Column and Other Works,” forthcoming in Hemingway and War, ed. Bickford Sylvester and James Meredith (Kent State UP, 2005); she is much interested in the way that wars—the American Civil War, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II—have served as loci within which male and female identities are renegotiated. She has become increasingly interested in the fiction of Martha Gellhorn and presented a paper on this neglected writer’s World War II novel, Point of No Return,” at the Jewish-American Literature Conference (2003); the editor of Jewish-American Literature has requested it for publication.
“To Have and Hold Not: Marie Morgan, Helen Gordon, and Dorothy Hollis.” in Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002: 81-92
“Music in The Great Gatsby and The Great Gatsby as Music.” in Literature and Musical Adaptation, ed. Michael J. Meyer, New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi P, 2002: 29-45.
“Hemingway's I-Lands in the Streams.” North Dakota Quarterly 68.2-3 (2001): 123-31.
“Just the Tip of the Iceberg Theory: Hemingway and Anderson’s ‘Loneliness,’” Hemingway Review 19.2 (2000):47-56.
“Gerald Murphy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dick Diver: The Artist’s Vocation,” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2 (Winter 1999-2000):359-65.
The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996.
Judith Abrams Plotz ; jplotz@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Harvard University) British romanticism, Anglophone Indian writing, British colonial literature, postcolonialism, children's literature
Professor Plotz currently focuses on British romanticism, British colonialism, romantic representations of childhood, children’s literature, and the Anglophone literature of India. These streams combine in her current large project, a book on Kipling and the female tradition of Victorian children’s literature. Over the past decade, Professor Plotz has written worked principally on questions concerning romanticism and childhood (the relation of the romantic tradition to the development of modern children’s literature; 19th-century children’s literature as colonial pedagogy) and on the encounters and intersections of Anglo-Indian and Indian texts. She is a board member and past president of the Children’s Literature Association.
“Tagore in the Warsaw Ghetto: Korczak’s Production of The Post Office.” in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition. Ed. Patrick Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.
Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood. Palgrave, 2001.
“Jane Austen Goes to India: Emily Eden’s Semi-Detached Home Thoughts from Abroad.” in The Postcolonial Jane Austen. Ed. You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. Routledge, 2000.
“Haroun and the Politics of Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 20.3 (Fall 1995).
“Latin for Empire: Kipling’s ‘Regulus’ as a Classics Class for the Ruling Classes.” The Lion and the Unicorn (Winter 1994-94).
Ann Romines annrom@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., George Washington University) American fiction 1850-1950, American women's writing and cultures, American regional writing, feminist theory
Professor Romines is primarily interested in American literature 1850-1950, with special emphasis on women's writing and cultures and on Southern and Western U.S. cultures. Her books and essays address issues of gender, domestic culture and place in American women's writing; currently, she is editing the Nebraska Scholarly Edition of Willa Cather's last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and starting a new book about the endings of women's writing lives in the South, focusing on Cather, Eudora Welty, Margaret Walker and Ellen Douglas. As a national board member, she is much involved in the work of the Willa Cather Educational Foundation, and she edits the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review. Her book on Laura Ingalls Wilder won the 1999 Children's Literature Association prize for best scholarly book on children's literature.
"Sapphira and the Slave Girl: The Old Story." The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather, ed. Marilee Lindemann. Cambridge UP, 2004.
"Admiring and Remembering: The Problem of Virginia" Cather Studies 5: Willa Cather's Environmental Imagination. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. U of Nebraska P, 2002.
Willa Cather's Southern Connections:New Essays on Cather and the South. (ed.) U of Virginia P, 2000.
Constructing the Little House: Gender, Culture, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. U of Massachusetts P, 1997.
The Home Plot: Women, Writing and Domestic Ritual. U of Massachusetts P, 1992.
Linda Bradley Salamon; lbs@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Bryn Mawr) Early Modern prose, Shakespeare, material culture, early encounters with Islam, film adaptation of texts, the picaresque
Professor Salamon studies Early Modern cultural history, founded in 16th-century prose, with current emphases on early encounters with non-European societies and on material culture. Recent or in-press publications explore military veterans among 'rogues' (the Tudor homeless,) Roger Ascham's view of 'the Turk' compared to the Black Legend of the Spanish Empire, historicized evil on film, and costume in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night. She is presently working on Early Modern how-to manuals, building on her study of Nicholas Hilliard's Arte of Limning; two imminent projects concern the shifting cultural site of sundials after clocks became accurate and advice books for 17th-century social climbers. In 2003-04, she held a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan and a Ringler Fellowship at the Huntington Library.
"Vagabond Veterans': The Rogueish Company of Martin Guerre and Henry V," in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
"The Imagery of Roger Ascham," in Literary Criticism, v. 102, ed. Tom Schoenberg. Gale Group, 2004.
"Theory avant la lettre: An Excavation in Early Modern England," in After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, pp. 265-283.
"'Looking for Richard' in History: Postmodern Villainy in Richard III and Scarface," Journal of Popular Film and Television, (28)2000, 55-63.
Nicholas Hilliard's Art of Limning, ed. with Arthur F. Kinney, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983; includes "The Art of Nicolas Hilliard," pp. 65-145.
"Evil Displaced into History: "Rope" (1948), "Compulsion" (1959), "Scarface" (1983), "Richard III" (1995)," in The Changing Face of Evil in Film and Television, ed. Martin Norden. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2005.
"Blackening 'The Turk' in Roger Ascham's Report of Germany (1551)," In progress.
Ormond Seavey; ocv@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Columbia University) Early American literature, 19th-century U.S. literature
Ormond Seavey received his Ph. D. from Columbia in 1976 after writing his dissertation on Benjamin Franklin. At GWU he has taught early American and 19th-Century American literature and 18th-century comparative literature. His edition of Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings from Oxford World Classics was reissued in 1998. In April 2003 he delivered a paper at the biennial convention of the Society of Early Americanists on the 18th-century con man Stephen Burroughs. His main scholarly work in recent years is a study of the relationship between Henry Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge; work on that project continues. An essay from that longer study entitled "Henry Adams and Henry Cabot Lodge, Teacher and Student: A Complicated Interaction" will appear in the forthcoming collection Henry Adams and the Need to Know edited by Earl Harbert and William Merrill Decker, Northeastern University Press, later in 2004.
"Benjamin Franklin as Imperialist and Provincial," in Benjamin Franklin: An American Genius, ed. Gianfranca Balestra and Luigi Sampietro. Bulzoni Editore, 1993.
Margaret Soltan ; msoltan@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Chicago) Postmodernism, cultural studies, 20th-century novel
Recently returned to GW after a semester abroad as Visiting Professor of Literature at the University of Toulouse , Margaret Soltan continues to explore modern literature and culture in her teaching and writing. Her latest scholarly essay, an examination of Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, will appear in the Modern Language Association volume, Approaches to Teaching White Noise. Her most recent journalistic writing, an essay about the Associate/Full Professor distinction, is forthcoming in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her weblog, University Diaries, is an ongoing examination of contemporary American university life.
With Professor Jennifer Green-Lewis, Professor Soltan is at work on a book titled The Return of Beauty to Literary Studies, a consideration of the resurgence of interest in aesthetic questions among English scholars.
Professor Soltan teaches many interdisciplinary courses attracting a mix of undergraduate, graduate, consortium, and alumni students. Most recently, her interdisciplinary courses have arisen out of her interest in comparisons of French and American literature and culture. She is the 2003-2004 recipient of the Academic Advising Award for Excellence in Departmental Advising at GW.
Christopher Sten ; csten@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Indiana University)) American novel, race/ethnicity, modernism,
Washington, DC, and Melville.
Professor Sten's main interests are American fiction 1800-1950; race, ethnicity, and empire; urban writing; the visual arts; and Herman Melville. While writing on a variety of figures, he has a longstanding interest in Melville, having published two critical studies of Melville's fiction and edited a collection of essays on Melville's appropriation of the visual arts. He is currently co-editing a collection of essays on "Melville in the Pacific," and completing a history of American writers' involvement in national politics, to be titled Washington, DC: The Politics of American Writing. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in Germany, he is a past President and Executive Secretary of the Melville Society.
"On Seeing Blue: Dutch Painting, Depression, and Generativity in Cather's The Professor's House." The Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and Review, 2003.
The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent State U Press, 1996.
"Melville's Cosmopolitanism: A Map for Living in a (Post-) Colonialist World," in Melville Among the Nations, 2001.
Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel. Kent State U Press, 1996.
Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts. Kent State U Press, 1992.
Gayle Wald ; gwald@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., Princeton University) African American literature, cultural theory, popular culture, popular music
Professor Wald’s areas of specialization include 20th-century African American literature, gender studies, and popular music studies. Her most recent research uses the life and career of gospel singer-guitarist Rosetta Tharpe to investigate questions of popular memory (and forgetting), U.S. music culture, and African American religious practices. She has published on boy bands, “girl” culture, soul music, and the film Clueless, as well as on African American women writers. Her book Crossing the Line, on race and racial passing, appeared from Duke UP in 2000.
Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.
“From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover,” American Quarterly 55, 3 (September 2003): 387-416.
“`I Want It That Way’: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands.” Genders 35 (Spring 2001). http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_wald.html
“Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, 42 (September 1999): 51-69.
“Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, 3 (Spring 1998): 585-610.
Tara Ghoshal Wallace tgw@gwu.edu
(Ph.D., University of Toronto) Eighteenth-Century British Literature; Romantics; Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Professor Wallace's current research includes discourses of empire in the 18th century, the intersection of history and fiction in 18th- and 19th-century novels, 18th-century drama. She is interested in the way 'big' history such as revolutions and empire building become material for literary interventions in culture. Her current book project, Imperial Contradictions: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature addresses uneasy articulations of empire in British texts from Aphra Behn to Walter Scott. She is also working on Walter Scott's representations of monarchy and on Frances Burney and the theatre.
"Fanny Burney as Dramatist." Commissioned chapter in forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Fanny Burney, ed. Peter Sabor.
"Filming Romance: Persuasion." Jane Austen on Screen. Eds. Gina Macdonald and Andrew F. Macdonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
"The Elephant's Foot and the British Mouth: Walter Scott on Imperial Rhetoric." European Romantic Review 13.3 (2002).
Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. Macmillan 1995.
Women Critics, 1660-1820 (co-editor). Indiana University Press, 1995.
Edition of Fanny Burney's A Busy Day. Rutgers 1984.
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