Professional Statement
I teach and write in the fields of later 17th-Century British literature (especially Milton), 18th-Century British Literature (especially after 1740), and Romanticism. Within those historical periods, my interests gravitate toward questions concerning aesthetics and poetics, science and literature, and literary historiography. My first book was Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge 2004; paperback edition 2008), and I am currently writing a book called The Science of Nostalgia: Mobility, Medicine, and Aesthetics in the Later Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.
Specialties
Books
| Title | Fields | |
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Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History This book traces connections between Georgic verse and developments in other spheres from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries: the mediation of perception by scientific instruments, of events by newspapers, of knowledge by the feelings, of the past by narrative. Kevis Goodman argues that because of the Georgic's concern for the transmission of knowledge and the extension .... |
Selected Publications and Papers Delivered
Book
Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Paperback Re-issue, 2008.
Full Length Articles and Book Chapters
"'Uncertain Disease': Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading." Studies in Romanticism 49 (Summer 2010): 197-227
"Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia." The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Eds. James Chandler and Maureen N McLane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008
"Magnifying Small Things: Georgic Modernity and the Noise of History," European Romantic Review 15:2 (Summer 2004): 215-227
"The Loophole in the Retreat: The Culture of News and the Early Life of Romantic Self-Consciousness," South Atlantic Quarterly 102:1 (Winter 2003): 25-52
"'Wasted Labor'?: Milton's Eve. The Poet's Work, and the Problem of Sympathy," ELH 64:4 (Summer 1997): 415-446
"Making Time for History: Wordsworth, the New Historicism, and the Apocalyptic Fallacy," Studies in Romanticism 35:4 (Winter 1996): 563-577. Reprinted, with new "Afterword 2004," in The Wordsworthian Enlighenment and the Ecology of Reading. Eds. Helen R. Elam and Frances Ferguson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005
Shorter Articles and Reviews
Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity, by David Simpson. European Romantic Review 23:1 (2012): 73-79
“Erasmus Darwin.” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism. Ed. Frederick Burwick, Nancy Moore Goslee, and Diane Hoeveller. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012
"Geoffrey Hartman's A Scholar's Tale: A Review Essay." The Wordsworth Circle 39 (Autumn 2008): 136-144
Nostalgia in Transition, 178001914, by Linda M. Austin. Nineteenth-Century Studies (Autumn 2007): 122-125
"Geoffrey Hartman's 'Psychoaesthetics.'" The Wordsworth Circle 37:1 (Winter 2006): 17-19
The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change, 1700-1830, by Clifford Siskin, Modern Language Quarterly 61:3 (Fall 2000): 545-551
Current Research
I am writing a book currently titled The Science of Nostalgia: Mobility, Medicine, and Aesthetics in the Later 18th and Early 19th Centuries. The project explores the shared ground and growing differences between Enlightenment medicine and empiricist aesthetics in Britain, specifically as both kinds of knowledge recorded and responded to an unprecedented degree – and new kinds – of mobility during the eighteenth century (emigration, homelessness, warfare and its displacements, exploration, global navigation, and trade, etc.). My entry to this large topic is modernity’s unwelcome double, ”nostalgia,” as it was then understood: a disease that resisted and undermined the imperative to move, or move on, and, for that reason, occasioned a sizeable body of medical and paramedical writing from its first appearance in 1688 through the Napoleonic era. I am especially interested in the ways that medical science’s unresolved confrontations with the causes and effects of mobility were absorbed into the developing ground of aesthetic theory and literary practice, persisting there in questions about the means and ends of producing emotion, ethical action, or political movement, as well as in conceptualizations of the reading process and metrical form.
Recent English Courses Taught
Fall, 2013
| 45A/2 | Literature in English: Through Milton |
Introductory Surveys |
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| 45A/201 -- discussion section |
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| 45A/202 -- discussion section |
No instructor assigned yet.
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| 246F/1 | Graduate Proseminar: The Later-Eighteenth Century |
British 18th-Century Graduate Courses |