Areas of Specialization
Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture is one of the most exciting fields of study in English right now. Scholars at Penn State are pursuing and teaching the intersections between literature and culture that define contemporary scholarship. These topics include:
Science Studies: Literature and the history of science, medicine and psychology; Darwinism and evolutionary theories of culture and the body; Romantic and Victorian anthropology and race theories; monsters and monstrosity in Romantic writing; nineteenth-century utopianism and science fictions. Visual Culture and Visual Arts: Histories of aesthetic value; the Gothic revival; photography, Pre-Raphaelite painters, and Victorian avant gardes; Aestheticism, Decadence, and fin-de-siècle culture. Gender and Sexuality: Victorian feminisms and the "Woman Question"; "Muscular Christianity"; sexuality, gender and religion; the rise of queer culture and the invention of sexology. Class, History, Politics: Marxism, working-class culture and the rise of labor politics; industrial revolutions, Crystal Palaces, and conditions of England; parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation; transatlantic exchanges between Britain and America; liberalism, liberty, anarchy, free trade; the rise of Modernism and modernity. Genre: Realism, the novel and narrative theory; literary canons and the invention of English studies; "new canons" of Romantic and Victorian poetry; poetics and gender; Romantic dramas, Victorian melodramas; poetics of Catholicism and atheism; Romantic poetry and critical theory. Literature and Empire: Romantic slave narratives and the subjectivities of empire; British colonial interventions in and representations of Ireland, India, Africa; the "Eastern Question"; travel writing; postcolonial theory; subaltern studies. Mass culture: Medievalism; conduct guides, illustrated magazines; sensation, gothic, and detective fictions; vampires, prostitutes, criminals, "savages."
In other words, the startling variety of nineteenth-century British literature and culture finds its reflection in Penn State's scholarship and course offerings. In 2005, here are the faculty involved in the nineteenth century:
Robert Caserio (Professor and Head of the English Department) is the author of over thirty articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and a specialist in the history and theory of narrative forms, culture, and ideas. He wrote the section on "Fiction Theory and Criticism: Nineteenth-Century British and American" in the second edition of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005). His essay, "The Name of the Horse: Hard Times , Semiotics, and the Supernatural" is re-printed in the collection Umberto Eco , in the SAGE Masters in Modern Social Thought series (2005).
Nicholas Joukovsky (Professor of English) is a world authority on the younger Romantic poets and the works of Thomas Love Peacock. Having edited Peacock's letters for Oxford University Press, he is now working on a biography of Peacock as well as researching the early life of George Meredith. His interests also include Romantic literary circles and literary politics; intertextuality and plagiarism; comic and satiric fiction; textual scholarship and editorial theory. His recent graduate seminars include "Poetry and Politics: Wordsworth and the Younger Romantics"; "The Shelleys and Their Circle"; "Romantic Satire: Austen, Peacock, and Byron"; and "Jane Austen in Context: Women Novelists of the Romantic Period."
Robert Lougy (Professor of English) is a specialist in Dickens, the Victorian novel, psychoanalysis, and the theory of fiction. His most recent book is Inaugural Wounds: The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives (2004). He has published a biography of Charles Robert Maturin, the Irish novelist and dramatist, and has edited The Children of the Chapel , a nineteenth-century novel by Algernon Charles Swinburne and his cousin, Mary Gordon. Professor Lougy's recent courses include "Shapes and Sounds of Desire in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry," "The Shaping of the Victorian Mind: Dreams, Madness, and Hysteria in the Victorian Novel," and "The Fiction of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy."
Rachel Teukolsky (Assistant Professor) specializes in Victorian non-fiction prose and the intersections of literature and the visual arts. She is currently completing a cultural study of Victorian art writing and aesthetics; her next project is tentatively titled Mapping Late-Victorian Counterculture: Sex, Geography, Utopia. Last year she taught courses in "Word and Image" and "The Victorian Body."
Paul Youngquist (Professor of English) is a wide-ranging scholar and critic whose interests extend from nineteenth-century British culture to critical theory to science fiction. He is a specialist in William Blake, and author of Madness and Blake's Myth. His latest book is Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (2003).
Recent Penn State Ph.D. dissertations in nineteenth-century British literature include Anjana Sharma's The Autobiography of Desire: Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s , published as a book by Macmillan India; Eric Lorentzen, Revolutionary Reading: Alternative Literacies for Marginalized Learners in the Nineteenth-century British Novel ; Marilyn Bonnell, Sarah Grand: The New Woman and Feminist Aesthetics ; Randall Beebe, "The Web of Being": Shelley's Allegories of History ; Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar, Albion's Epic Heroines: Romanticism, Gender, and Nationalism, 1790-1830 ; Sara S. Postlethwaite, William Blake's Textual Gnosis ; Danielle Conger, Making Mothers: British Motherhood in the Age of Revolution ; Leslee Zillmer , Charity and Class in Victorian Literature and Art ; and Sean Grass's project on prisons in the Victorian novel, The Self in the Cell , published by Routledge.
Graduate students in nineteenth-century studies at Penn State are a small and exclusive group. We offer the kind of personal attention to our graduate students that is usually associated with a smaller university. Our nineteenth-century Ph.D.s are now teaching as some of the best liberal arts colleges in the US, including Mary Washington College, Oberlin College, Franklin and Marshall College, and Carleton College. They have published essays in such journals as Dickens Studies Annual , Nineteenth-Century Literature , Philological Quarterly , Review of English Studies , Studia Neophilologica , English Language Notes , Studies in the Novel , Women's Writing , Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly , The Wordsworth Circle , Keats-Shelley Journal , Victorians Institute Journal , and English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 , among others.
Beginning in Fall 2005, we will be organizing a nineteenth-century British literature reading group for faculty and graduate students. Each meeting will be hosted by a different group member, with readings selected around a particular theme; potential topics include the Victorian fairy tale, scandal journalism, forgeries, the "new canon" of Romantic and Victorian female poets, travel writing, and Victorian drama. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to hear more about Penn State's graduate program. Our email addresses are listed in the departmental directory on this web site.
