The Novel and Short Fiction

The English Department has an especially strong community of scholars whose work focuses on the novel and short fiction. Courses span more than three centuries and traverse the globe. Students can trace a history of fiction from the romances, epistolary fiction, satire, and Gothic novels of the eighteenth century through the proliferating popular forms and expanding readership created by nineteenth-century global and cultural expansion. The trajectory continues in courses that investigate contemporary experimental narrative, postcolonial fiction, and popular forms such as science fiction or detection, graphic novels, and digital productions. A concentration of courses in the novel and short fiction also offers students lively encounters with a variety of critical methodologies and theoretical perspectives.

Faculty

• Florence Boos
  • social and political issues in the Victorian novel
  • utopian fiction; prose romances (e. g. News from Nowhere, Pre-Raphaelite prose tales)
  • historical fiction; new women fiction; working-class fiction
  • women novelists and writers of short fiction
• Lori Branch
  • religion, secularity, and the rise of the novel
  • 18th-century British sentimental fiction
  • sentiment as ethical resistance
• Corey Creekmur
  • the 20th-century American novel
  • Genre fiction (especially crime, mystery, & detective)
  • the African American novel
• Barbara Eckstein
  • the urban novel in reciprocal relation to city making
  • oral storytelling and the literary short story
• Mary Lou Emery
  • the modernist novel (including British and colonial writers)
  • Caribbean fiction of the 20th century
  • postcolonial novels
• Cheryl Herr
  • postwar fiction of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales
  • novels about underground economies (drugs and other smuggled goods, youth cultures, migration and asylum-seeking, paramilitarism)
  • novels about London (tower blocks, transport, streets, music-halls and theaters)
  • phenonememological fiction
  • proto-cinematic modernist narrative
• Kevin Kopelson
  • "confessional" narrative
  • war narrative
  • 20th-century satire
  • non-canonical British modernists
  • Proustians and other perverts
• Priya Kumar
  • South Asian novels in English and in translation (primarily Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan)
  • Cosmopolitanism in South Asian novels
  • Secularism and contemporary South Asian novels
  • Partition narratives (trauma, memory and witnessing)
  • South Asian women's fiction
• Brooks Landon
  • Science fiction literature and film
  • contemporary fiction
  • 20th-century American fiction
  • literary responses to technology
• Rob Latham
  • the Postmodernist Novel, especially:
  • metafiction (John Barth, Ishmael Reed)
  • encyclopedic works (Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis)
  • minimalism (Joan Didion, Donald Barthelme)
  • collage texts (William Burroughs, Kathy Acker)
  • slipstream (Jeff Noon, Kathryn Kramer)
  • speculative fiction (J.G. Ballard, Stanislaw Lem)
  • New Gothic (Angela Carter, Patrick McGrath)
• Susan Lohafer
  • short fiction theory
  • history and criticism of the short story
  • textual grammar, text processing, cognitive models of storyness
  • border crossings between fiction and nonfictional narrative
  • 19th- and 20th-century American literature
• Teresa Mangum
  • Victorian fiction including popular forms such as the sensation novel, detective novel, New Woman novel, and "empire" narratives
  • serialized fiction in nineteenth-century periodicals
  • international novels from the eighteenth-century to the present focused on late life
• Harry Stecopoulos
  • the US novel, late 19th and 20th centuries
  • Faulkner
  • Twain
• Garrett Stewart
  • Victorian and early-modern British fiction
  • genre, narrative, and reader-response theory