Mitchell Breitwieser, Professor

Office: 420 Wheeler

Phone: 510-642-2033

Areas of Interest

American Literature to 1900. 20th-Century American Literature. 20th-Century British Literature. Critical Theory. Narrative & the Novel.

Current Research

Professor Breitwieser also works on literature and religion.

Selected Publications and Papers Delivered

Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality (Cambridge University Press Studies in American Litera-ture and Culture, 1984).

American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief and Eth-nology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: The Uni-versity of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2007).

"Cotton Mather's Crazed Wife," Glyph: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies #5 (Summer, 1979), pp. 88-113.

"Cotton Mather's Pharmacy," Early American Literature XVI, # 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 42-9.

"Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod," Studies in Romanticism 20, #1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 3-20.

"False Sympathy in Melville's Typee," American Quarterly 34, # 4 (Fall, 1982), pp. 396-417.

Review of Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Ex-peri-ence of the American Frontier, 1630-1860, in Criticism.

"Who Speaks in Whitman's Poems?" The Bucknell Review XVIII, #1 (1983), pp. 121-43.

"Jefferson's Prospect," Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 10(1985), pp.

"Concluding Remarks," Politics as Art, Art as Politics: Literature of the Early Republic, spe-cial issue of Early American Literature 22, #2 (Fall, 1987), pp. 213-9.

Review of Albert Furtwangler, American Silhouettes: Rhetorical Identities of the Founders, in Eighteenth Centuries Studies (Summer, 1988), pp. 547-51.

Review of Ormond Seavey, Becoming Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and the Life, in William and Mary Quarterly (Oct., 1989), pp. 816-819.

"Early American Antigone," in Joseph Kronick and Bainard Cowan, eds., Theorizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History (Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 125-62.

"The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness," Arizona Quarterly vol. 47, #3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 17-70. (excerpted in Harold Bloom, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2000), pp. 38-40.)

"Afterthoughts," invited commentary on "The New Eighteenth Century," a special issue of American Literary History, vol. 5, #3 (Fall, 1993), pp. 588-94."False Sympathy in Melville's Typee," (rewritten version of #4 above), in Myra Jehlen, ed., Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994), pp. 15-26.

"The Vagaries of Historical Reading," invited essay review of Sacvan Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, Modern Language Quarterly vol 56, #2(June, 1995)pp.197-207.

"Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the Problem of Inherited Mourning," Peter Homans, ed., in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 43-61.

"Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation," American Literary History, vol. 12, # 3 (Fall, 2000), pp. 359-82.

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