Office: Keezell 418

Spring 2024 Office Hours:
MW - 10:30-11:00am and by appointment

Education:
Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 1989 
M.A., Case Western Reserve University, 1986
B.A., Ohio University, Honors Tutorial College, 1982
Trinity College, Carmarthen, Wales, 1980-81

Interests: 
Victorian literature, literary criticism, feminist theory, creative criticism, reading and psychoanalysis

Publications:

Books

Reading the Victorian Novel, Routledge 2024.

Charles Dickens: but for you, dear stranger (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Thus I Lived With Words: Robert Louis Stevenson & the Writer's Craft, U of Iowa Press, 2017.

Engagements with Close Reading. Routledge, 2015.

Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture. University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing.Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.

Edited Collections

My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. University of Missouri Press, 2020. 

Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years, ed. University of Missouri Press, 2009.

Selected articles since 1994

"Dickens and His Publics." Co-written with Michelle Allen-Emerson, guest editors of a special issue of Dickens Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1 (March 2024), pp. 6-10.

“Introduction: In the Personal Voice.” My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. Ed. Annette R. Federico. University of Missouri Press, 2020. 3-34. 

“The Hand of Fate: On Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.” My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. Ed. Annette R. Federico. University of Missouri Press, 2020. 279-302.

“An Imaginary Paradise of Individuals.” Studies in the Novel 51.1 (Spring 2019): 51-53. (Invited contributor to 50th anniversary issue.)

"Satis House." Literary Imagination (Jan. 21, 2019). imy083, https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imy083

“Stevenson’s Mortal Questions.” Victorians Institute Journal 42.2 (2014): 1-31.

“Dorothea’s Boudoir: Reading, Dream Work, and Ethical Perception.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56.5 (Winter 2014): 400-27. Winner of the Tony Hilfer Award for Best Essay in TSLL 2014.

"The Violent Deaths of Oliver Twist." PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 47.4 (Fall 2011): 363-385.

“’Bursting All the Doors’: The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years.” Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years. Ed. Annette R. Federico. University of Missouri Press, 2009. 1-26.

“Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved: Love’s Descent.” ELT: English Literature in Transition 50.3 (2007): 269-90.

“Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Studies in the Novel 37.1 (2005): 50-63.

“Irony, Ethics, and Self-Fashioning in George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man.” Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880-1930. Ed. Marysa Demoor. London: Palgrave, 2004. 96-113.

“David Copperfield and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Victorian Studies 46.1 (2003): 69-95.

“Being Torn: The Mill on the Floss.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 12 (2001): 359-79.

“Dickens and Disgust.” Dickens Studies Annual 29 (2000): 145-62.

“Marie Corelli and the New Woman.” Victorian Women Writers and The Woman Question. Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999.

“Marie Corelli: Aestheticism in Suburbia.” Women and British Aestheticism, 1860-1934. Eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

“Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh: Rewriting the Family.” ELT: English Literature in Transition 38.4 (1995): 466-82.

“The Other Case: Gender and Narration in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor.” PLL: Papers on Language and Literature 30.4 (1994): 323-45. Reprinted in The Brontës. Ed. Patricia Ingham. London: Longman, 2002; Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism (2002); The Brontës: Critical Assessments. Ed. Eleanor McNees. Sussex: Helm, 1995.

“Books for Boys: Violence and Representation in Kidnapped and Catriona.” Victorians Institute Journal 22 (1994): 115-33.