English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Yale University, 1971
M. Phil., English Language and Literature, Yale University, 1970
B. A., English, with High Honors, Swarthmore College, 1967

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: The novel; history of gender and sexuality; literature and the visual arts

My research and teaching focus on the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, though I also have strong interests in the history of gender and sexuality and —- more recently -- in the relations of literature to the visual arts. As a teacher and critic, I am concerned with the way fictional narratives both respond to and imaginatively transform their culture. I also enjoy writing on a variety of literary topics for a wider public in the London Review of Books. My most recent book concerns seventeenth-century Dutch painting as a model for literary realism and includes chapters on Balzac, George Eliot, Hardy and Proust, among other writers.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel: Princeton University Press, November 2007)

--Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)

--Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)

--ed., Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986; paperback, 1990)

--The Death and Letters of Alice James, ed. with a biographical essay(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981; paperback, 1983; rpt. Boston: Exact Change Press, 1997)

-Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; paperback, 1980)

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Victorian Novel (lecture); Jane Austen; Henry James and the Movies; Virginia Woolf; European Literary Tradition

GRADUATE COURSES: Clarissa and the Critics; Jane Austen and her Contemporaries; George Eliot and the Problem of Realism; Problems in Victorian Fiction; Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel; Hardy and his Contemporaries; Henry James, Novel Theory and Critical Practice, Novel Minds: The Representation of Consciousness from Austen to Woolf