Book
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), in Victorian Periodical Studies by Julia Sorge Way (here), in Victorians Institute Journal by Megan Ward (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Edited Special Issue
Co-Editor with Megan Ward, special issue of Studies in the Novel, “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel.” Forthcoming December, 2024.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Larsson, Remade: A Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy in English.” Karl Berglund and Sarah Allison. Forthcoming in PMLA, January 2024.
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
My second book on literary celebrity in antislavery and nineteenth-century print culture is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Figures of Authorship: Literary Celebrity, Antislavery, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture argues that a wide range of nineteenth-century cultural producers used literary forms that made readers feel close to authors to lend cultural capital to the transatlantic political movement against slavery.
Such forms worked together to activate the power of what Tom Mole calls, in his study of Lord Byron’s celebrity, the “person of the poet.” In the complex ecosystem of nineteenth century literary culture, novels circulated alongside nonfictional narrative forms that included accounts of authors’ lives. Fiction drew meaning from the factual forms just adjacent to it, including not only “true” accounts of fictional events but also autobiographical and biographical accounts of the lives of central author figures. Figures of the Author focuses on nonfictional forms that cluster around the author, including texts about celebrity authors and celebrity-authored texts whose significance in their own time had more to do with the cachet of the author than the content of the text itself. The deployment of literary celebrity in the genre of antislavery reveals the collective production of literature and of literary figures in the nineteenth century.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineteenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), in Victorian Periodical Studies by Julia Sorge Way (here), in Victorians Institute Journal by Megan Ward (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Edited Special Issue
Co-Editor with Megan Ward, special issue of Studies in the Novel, “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Towards a New History of the Novel.” Forthcoming December, 2024.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Larsson, Remade: A Computational Perspective on the Millennium Trilogy in English.” Karl Berglund and Sarah Allison. Forthcoming in PMLA, January 2024.
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
My second book on literary celebrity in antislavery and nineteenth-century print culture is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Figures of Authorship: Literary Celebrity, Antislavery, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture argues that a wide range of nineteenth-century cultural producers used literary forms that made readers feel close to authors to lend cultural capital to the transatlantic political movement against slavery.
Such forms worked together to activate the power of what Tom Mole calls, in his study of Lord Byron’s celebrity, the “person of the poet.” In the complex ecosystem of nineteenth century literary culture, novels circulated alongside nonfictional narrative forms that included accounts of authors’ lives. Fiction drew meaning from the factual forms just adjacent to it, including not only “true” accounts of fictional events but also autobiographical and biographical accounts of the lives of central author figures. Figures of the Author focuses on nonfictional forms that cluster around the author, including texts about celebrity authors and celebrity-authored texts whose significance in their own time had more to do with the cachet of the author than the content of the text itself. The deployment of literary celebrity in the genre of antislavery reveals the collective production of literature and of literary figures in the nineteenth century.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
