My research focuses on two related fields: the Anglo-American novel, especially from 1875 to the present, and the theory of the novel, which develops into its own discipline during this period. I am particularly interested in problems of novelistic form. For my work on point of view, voice, narrative, and the politics of form, see Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford UP, 1998); The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); and The Novel and the New Ethics (Stanford UP, 2020).
Recent articles related to The Novel and the New Ethics include "On Beauty as Beautiful?The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics by way of Zadie Smith" (Contemporary Literature, 2012); "Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-first Century" (PMLA, 2009); "The Art of English Fiction in the Twentieth Century" (The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel, 2009); and "Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel" (Narrative, 2007).
Other recent projects include: "Faulkner's Light in August and New Theories of Novelistic Time" in A Question of Time, ed. Cindy Weinstein, Cambridge UP (Cambridge UP, 2019); "The Place of the Novel in Reparative Reading," in Studies in the Novel (Spring 2019); and Afterword for "Formalism Unbound," special double issue of Post45 (January 2021).
