About the Faculty

Richard Maxwell
richard.maxwell@yale.edu

Richard Maxwell's interests include the history of the novel; of lyric poetry (especially from the late nineteenth century on); of the tale collection; of the illustrated book; and of film. Maxwell is the author of The Mysteries of Paris and London (1992) and The Historical Novel in Europe: 1650-1950 (2009) and the editor of The Victorian Illustrated Book (2002), A Tale of Two Cities (2003), and (with Katie Trumpener) The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (2008). He has recently written essays on the motif of the discovered manuscript (a feature of the novel from ancient times to the present); the Arabian Nights in the mirror of eighteenth-century French literature; Tennyson's Kraken in the context of Victorian science, and Edward Lear's Illustrations of Tennyson. Maxwell is currently writing about questions of temporality and scope in extremely long novels--and the simultaneous tendency of such novels to appropriate the formal effects of lyric poetry. Long fascinated by urban cityscapes, he is also writing about exploration, topography, and panoramic survey in paintings, films, novels, and travel narratives (ranging from the fantastic to the scientific). Maxwell is probably the only person on earth to have edited more than one magazine centered on the novelistic career of John Cowper Powys.