Office: 464 EBP
     Phone: 319-335-0446
     E-Mail: loren-glass@uiowa.edu

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Loren Glass

19th & 20th-Century American Literature and Culture, Cultural Studies

In both my teaching and my scholarship, I find myself centrally engaged with the relationship between literature and popular culture, mostly, though not exclusively, in the United States. Methodologically, my approach to this relationship involves combining sociological analysis of the cultural field with close readings of individual texts, which is why I consider my work to fall under the rubric of cultural studies. My book, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980, chronicles the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, as a strategy for negotiating the tensions between elite and popular conceptions of authorship, up through its contemporary manifestations that, I argue, no longer sustain the cultural authority they once did. My current project, tentatively titled Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism, covers similar terrain, deploying similar methods, but with a considerably larger geographic and historical scope. I hope to establish that the very understanding of the "literary" as an aesthetic category in both England and the United States emerged in complex dialectical entanglement with the legal category of obscenity, and that this entanglement illuminates the historical parameters of modernism as a cultural project.