Areas of Specialization
Eighteenth-Century British Literature
The Eighteenth Century (or "The Long Eighteenth Century" as it is now often called) has been a special area of strength at Penn State for many years. Relatively few students go to graduate school thinking they want to specialize in this period, but since 1980 21 doctoral degrees have been completed here in this period.
As of 2007-2008, faculty in this field are Robert D. Hume (Evan Pugh Professor of English Literature); Clement C. Hawes (Professor of English); and John T. Harwood (Associate Professor of English Literature and Senior Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology, Information Technology Services).
Theses completed in recent years include Matthew J. Kinservik's "Disciplining Satire: The Plays of Fielding, Foote, and Macklin"; Paul D. Cannan's "'The Generation of a Critic': The emergence of Dramatic Criticism in England, 1660-1715"; Amy Elizabeth Smith's "Private Letters, Public Narratives: Epistolary Travel Writing in Eighteenth-Century Britain", Don-John Dugas's "Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare, Performance, and Print Culture, 1660-1738" Elisabeth Heard's "Farquhar and the New Comedy, 1695-1710"; and Vidhya Swaminathan's "Rhetoric of Liberty and Restraint: British Abolitionist Writing, National Identity, and Race, 1769-1796." As students, these people had full-length articles accepted by such journals as Modern Philology , Philological Quarterly , The Review of English Studies , Studies in Philology , Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America , Harvard Library Bulletin , Afro-American Review , Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Theatre Survey . They are now employed, respectively, at the University of Delaware, the University of Minnesota/Duluth, the University of the Pacific, Kent State University, St. Louis University, and Long Island University. Current students have articles published or forthcoming in Studies in Philology , Philological Quarterly , The British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies , Modern Language Review , and Studies in Romanticism .
We have a strong commitment to all genres and a wide range of methods. Rob Hume's 14 books range from Dryden's Criticism (Cornell, 1970) to The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976), Henry Fielding and the London Theatre (Oxford, 1988), and (in collaboration) Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London (2 vols., Oxford, 1995 and 2001). His Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism (Oxford, 1999) will be followed eventually by a successor-volume, tentatively titled Historicism and Literature: Six Essays in Contextual Hermeneutiacs . At present he is seeing a two-volume edition of Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings Associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham through press (forthcoming from Oxford in 2006) and working on books on Theatre Finances in London, 1660-1800 and The Economics of Culture in London, 1660-1820 . Clem Hawes's publications include the monograph Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge, 1996), the edited volume Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (St. Martin's, 1999), the New Riverside edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), and The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (Palgrave, 2005). He has also published numerous essays in journals and anthologies on such eighteenth-century authors as Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Johnson, and John Gay, as well as on the "turn" to these eighteenth-century authors in contemporary authors such as Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka. John Harwood's publications include Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy (Southern Illinois, 1982); The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy (Southern Illinois, 1986); and The Early Essays and 'Ethics' of Robert Boyle (Southern Illinois, 1991). He is at present working on a study of the rhetoric of John Evelyn.
Current faculty interests include economics, print culture and the bourgeois public sphere, interdisciplinary studies of various sorts (science and literature, opera, ballet, theatre architecture), and history of aesthetics and criticism; religious enthusiasm and rhetorics of "madness"; postcolonial literature and theory; imperial conflicts; the historical formation of racial ideologies; the "forging" or invention of national traditions; the resonance of the Enlightenment in contemporary literature.
Our group has strong ties to faculty in other departments (particularly History) and those faculty have been exceptionally active and helpful members of our thesis committees. Because of John Harwood's senior position in Information Technology, we are especially well situated to help students in using technology in both scholarship and teaching. Several of our students have made major use of these resources and found the experience helpful on the job market. We strongly encourage our students to build on Penn State's national prominence in rhetoric, as Christine Skolnik did in her thesis on "Rhetorics of the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Britain." We are especially eager to help students make use of the possibilities of technology in research and teaching-an area in which Penn State is especially strong.
The Penn State Library is the twelfth-ranked academic library in North America (according to last year's assessment results published in The Chronicle of Higher Education ). In some ways, it is even better than that, since it is heavy on electronic resources. We were one of the first libraries in the country to buy ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), which makes available fully searchable electronic facsimilies (printable) of essentially all book and pamphlet titles published in England or in English, 1701-1800-accessible anywhere you have a broadband connection. This amounts to some 300,000 volumes for the eighteenth century. Our holdings of original editions in Rare Books are astonishingly good, and we are continuing to add to them. The library regularly buys rare books and manuscripts in support of our graduate student projects and theses. Microfilm is now a very obsolete technology, but we have a lot of material available in that form. We own films of the entire Early English Newspaper series (including the Burney Newspapers from the British Library), the whole historical run of Sotheby sale catalogues, the British Library's unique Thomason Tract collection, and all sorts of other things.
For the last 27 years "eighteenth century" faculty and students (including pre-thesis students) have met weekly year round for a long lunch at which we discuss student and faculty work in progress, recent publications, teaching, and academic politics. Anyone who wants a student's-eye view of our program should contact recent graduates: Matt Kinservik (matthewk@udel.edu); Paul Cannan (pcannan@d.umn.edu); Amy Smith (asmith@uop.edu); Don-John Dugas (ddugas@kent.edu); Elisabeth Heard (heardej@slu.edu); or Vidhya Swaminathan (Srividhya.Swaminathan@liu.edu or flame867@earthlink.net). We try to keep our group small and select, but we are always interested in hearing from potential applicants, and will be pleased to correspond by e-mail about the nature of our program and opportunities at Penn State.