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Department of English

Recent Faculty Publications


Feeling for the Poor (University of Virginia Press Victorian Literature and Culture Series, 2010), by Carolyn Betensky

What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was
precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them -- in and of
itself -- mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others.

Special Journal Issue: "The Sublime and Education" guest-edited by J. Jennifer Jones (Romantic Circles Praxis,
August 2010)

Rooted in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, this diverse collection engages comparatively with Romantic-era literature and cultural theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. One underlying inspiration is the pedagogical theory of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has thought widely about humanities-based training using Romantic-era texts as principal theoretical and literary tools, formative among them the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. Spivak's pedagogical theory can perhaps best be apprehended through the claim that proper pedagogy consists in "the uncoercive rearrangement of desires," which is to say a pedagogy founded on a notion of an immanent rather than a transcendental sublime. In complementary but nevertheless highly individuated ways, each contributor to this volume offers just this type of reformative work.

This volume of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes an editor's introduction by J. Jennifer Jones; essays by Christopher Braider, Frances Ferguson, Paul Hamilton, Anne McCarthy, Forest Pyle, and Deborah Elise White; and an afterword by Ian Balfour.

"Tycoon Medievalism, Corporate Philanthropy, and American Pedagogy," by Kathleen Davis

Special issue on American Medievalism. American Literary History 22:4 (2010): 1-20.

"Periodization and the Matter of Precedent," by Kathleen Davis

Medieval Cultural Studies 1:3 (2010): 1-7.

Called Back (Alyson Books, October 2009), by Mary Cappello

In this sensuous and intelligent memoir, Mary Cappello, Professor of English and Creative Writing, wonders aloud for us what breast cancer awareness really makes us aware of, and responds as if for the first time to the deceivingly simple command: tell me what you’re feeling. Called Back looks through the lens of cancer to discover new truths about intimacy and essential solitude, the fact of the body, and the impossibility of turning away. Excerpts appear in the Summer 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, and the Fall 2010 issue of The Seattle Review, "Issues with Death," the first of two special issues of the journal guest edited by David Shields. Cappello discussed “The Language of Cancer” with Wisconsin Public Radio Host, Jean Feraca for “Here on Earth,” and was interviewed in the HERE, TV studios by journalist Julie Bolcer in NY, NY. In that interview, she addresses the political nature of the disease; her aversion to pink kitsch; the horror of being called back into mammography and the necessity to recall one's experience for a community of readers; her desire to create a range of tonalities in her writing as antidote to cancer muzak and counter-rituals to cancer's highly ritualized routines.

Print, radio and video interviews relative to Called Back can be accessed at www.alyson.com, at www.marycappello.com, as well as on YouTube.

Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, (John Hopkins University Press, 2009), edited by Kathleen Davis

Professor Kathleen Davis is the editor of, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, Co-edited with Nadia Altschul. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Her introduction to the volume, co-written with Nadia Altschul, is titled, “The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe.” Professor Davis' recent publications also include “The Sense of an Epoch: Periodization and Sovereignty from Schmitt and Benjamin to Blumenberg and Koselleck" in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, ed. D. Vance Smith and Andrew Cole. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. 39-69, and “Boredom, Brevity and Last Things: Ælfric’s Style and the Politics of Time.” A Companion to Ælfric. Ed. Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan. Leiden: Brill Press, 2009. Pp. 321-344.

Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, edited by Naomi Mandel

This collection of nine critical essays on U.S. novelist Bret Easton Ellis focuses on the writer’s mature period: American Psycho (1991), Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005). The volume is composed of three sections, each devoted to a key text, presenting newly-commissioned essays from scholars based in the U.S. and Europe; each section is accompanied by a short introduction.

The collection reflects Ellis' uneasy positioning between the literature of Generation X and Blank Fiction, and treats American Psycho as his definitive work. American Psycho elicited unprecedented public debate and remains one of the most controversial novels of the contemporary period. Ellis' subsequent novel Glamorama foreshadowed the centrality of terror and the ubiquity of cyberculture in the 21st century, and Lunar Park offers a retrospective, quasi-biographical account of the author and his work.

The objectives of the volume are to examine the alchemy of acclaim and disdain that accrues to this controversial writer, and to establish Ellis's centrality to scholarship and teaching of contemporary American literature in the U.S. and in Europe.


“Negotiating Gifts: Jefferson’s Diplomatic Presents” by Martha Elena Rojas

Professor Martha Elena Rojas has published, “Negotiating Gifts: Jefferson’s Diplomatic Presents,” in The Old Word and the New: Exchanges Between America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard Sadofsky, et al. University of Virginia Press, 2010.