• Scottish
• 19th-Century British
• 18th-Century British
• Narrative & the Novel

Monographs

Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; paperback, 2005

Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007; paperback, 2016
(Saltire Society / National Library of Scotland Research Book of the Year Award, 2008)

Edited collections

"Scott, Scotland and Romantic Nationalism": special issue of Studies in Romanticism (40:1, Spring 2001). Co-edited with Ann Rowland and Charles Snodgrass.

Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism. Co-edited with Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels. Co-edited with Evan Gottlieb. Modern Language Association, 2009

The Edinburgh Companion to James Hogg. Co-edited with Douglas Mack. Edinburgh University Press, 2012  

Editions

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World. Oxford University Press, 1995, 1998. 

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Walter Scott, Rob Roy. Oxford University Press, 1998.

James Hogg, Winter Evening Tales: Collected among the Cottagers in the South of Scotland. Edinburgh University Press, 2002; 2004.  

Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology. Co-edited with Elizabeth Bohls. Oxford University Press, 2005.

James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped. Oxford University Press, 2014
 

Selected recent essays

“Altered States: Galt, Serial Fiction and the Romantic Miscellany,” John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society, ed. Regina Hewitt. Bucknell UP (2012), pp. 53-71

"Late Scott," The Edinburgh Companion to Walter Scott, ed. Fiona Robertson. Edinburgh UP (2012), pp. 130-142.

"On Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle," BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. 

"Death and the Author," Taking Liberties with the Author: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Meredith L. McGill. English Institute / ACLS E-Books (2013).

“George Eliot and the Science of the Human.” A Companion to George Eliot, ed. Amanda Anderson and Harry Shaw. Blackwell-Wiley (2013)

"Human Habitats: The City and the Form of Man," Romantic Cityscapes, ed. Jens Martin Gurr and Berit Michel. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (2013), 33-42

"George Eliot's Science Fiction," Denotatively, Technically, Literally, ed. Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt (special issue), Representations 125 (Winter 2014), 15-39

"Walter Scott and the Historical Novel," The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 2, English and British Fiction 1750-1820, ed. Peter Garside and Karen O'Brien. Oxford University Press (2015), 312-331.

"Spawn of Ossian," Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations and Engagements 1760-1820, ed. Evan Gottlieb. Bucknell University Press (2015), 3-18

“Kant, Herder and the Anthropological Turn,” Romanticism and Knowledge, ed. Stefanie Fricke, Felicitas Menhard and Katharina Pink (Trier, 2015), 63-71

"The Nineteenth Century" (with Sheila Kidd), The International Companion to Scottish Poetry, ed. Carla Sassi (Scottish Literature International, 2016), 64-73

“Literature: Historicism and Organic Form in Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain, ed. Mark Bevir. Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)

“The Lost World’s Other Nature,”  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Science Fiction, ed. Tom Ue. Manchester University Press (forthcoming)

“Aesthetics and Form in Charles Darwin’s Writings,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of English Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz. OUP online (forthcoming)

Recent talks and lectures:

"Human Time: After Buffon" (paper) and "Literary Science" (roundtable), MLA Convention, Vancouver, Jan. 2015

"After Natural Man: Buffon, Rousseau, Kant, Herder": The Biological Turn in Literary Studies. Symposium, Duke University, Feb. 2015

"Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Enlightenment Anthropology and the Romantic Historical Novel." Giorgio Melchiori Lecture, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, March 2015

“Bildung of Humanity: Anthropology, Irony, and the Romantic Novel.” 21^st annual Vincent A. De Luca Lecture in Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of Toronto, April 2015

"Bad Hogg." James Hogg Society Conference, Hogg and his World, Toronto, April 2015

"George Eliot and Species Consciousness." Séminaire "Politique, Culture, Société, XIXe-XXIe siècles: Littérature et Sciences humaines," Aix-Marseille Université, November 2015

"Realism's Human Forms." Berkeley Lecture, Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, LMU Munich, December 2015

"Dickens, Transformist." Indiana University, January 2016

"Charles Dickens, Transformist: Popular Science, Romantic Poetry, and the Victorian Novel"; "Infinity or Totality: The Romantic Bildungsroman and the Theory of the Novel." Barbara L. Packer Lectures, UCLA, April 2016

“The Anthropology of Form in Schiller and Darwin.” Anthropology and Literature Forum, MLA, Philadelphia, Jan. 2017

"The Prose of the World, or, The Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Realism, Lyric, and Totality in Bleak House." Boston Area Romanticism Colloquium, Boston University, April 2017

"Dickens's Teratology: The Natural History of Bleak House." Victorian Colloquium, Princeton University, April 2017

Upcoming:

"Don Giovanni, or, the last aristocrat": University of Genoa, May 2017 [to be read by proxy]

"Natural Histories of Form: From Aesthetic Education to Sexual Selection." Keynote lecture, Victorian Form and Reform conference, UC Santa Cruz, August 2017

"The Politics of Protagonicity in Don Giovanni." GER Conference, The Politics of Romanticism, Univ. of Bamberg, Oct. 2017. 

I am completing a book with the provisional title The Form of the Novel and the Form of Man (under advance contract with Princeton University Press): a study of the novel's interactions with natural history and philosophical anthropology in Europe, from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era -- from Buffon's Natural History to Darwin's The Descent of Man, from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Chapters consider: 1.) Enlightenment philosophical anthropology (Buffon, Rousseau, Ferguson, Herder, Kant); 2.) The new Romantic genres of the Bildungsroman and the historical novel (Goethe, Staël, Scott); 3.) Lamarckian / Geoffroyan historical romances circa 1830 by Scott (Count Robert of Paris) and Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris); 4.) Dickens's Romantic transformism in Bleak House (cf. Owen, Chambers) versus the anthropomorphic techniques of Victorian realism; 5.) "Species consciousness" and the science-fiction turn in George Eliot's major novels.

My other current work in progress is a book called Scotland and Romanticism, for Cambridge University Press. It willl offer a short, authoritative critical overview of Scotland's long Romantic century, from the late eighteenth-century projects of the human sciences and revivals of indigenous poetry to Scott's late novels and Carlyle's French Revolution. Part I explores the genres and institutions of Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic-period writing; Part II examines a series of case studies according to representative topoi: the lost nation, popular festivity, world literature, and the fanatic.

I am also thinking about a short book on Charles Darwin and the relations between scientific and aesthetic conceptions of form in nineteenth-century writing; and maybe another short book, on Scott's late career (1825-32).

Spring, 2017

Fall, 2016

Spring, 2016

Spring, 2015

Show ALL Courses