Miriam L. Wallace
Professor of English & Gender Studies
Division of Humanities
5800 Bay Shore Rd Sarasota, FL 34243
Chair's Office: ACE-118
Office Phone: 941-487-4335
Office Hours for Fall 2022
Wednesday 11:00am-1:00pm
Chapter 12: The Everyday Celebrity of “Sir” Jeffrey Dunstan, Mayor of Garrat in Making Stars: Biography & Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Eds. Nora Nachumi & Kristina Straub, U Delaware Press, 2022.
In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, the concept of celebrity emerged as the public fascination with the private lives of publicly visible individuals increased. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks.
The contributors reject the idea that biography is limited to print or is a single author’s account of another individual’s coherent life story. Instead, the contributors present us with a cacophony of voices, speaking from multiple positions in the public sphere through multiple media, shaping life stories in which contradictions trouble the linear arch that defines an individual’s personal development and history. Making Stars provides readers with a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that is mediated across multiple sites with varied and sometimes contradictory effects, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.
Introduction: Facing Emotions
Katharine Ann Jensen & Miriam L. Wallace
Animals Are from Venus, Human Beings from Mars: Averroës’s Aristotle & the Rationality of Emotion in Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega”
Gregory B. Stone
Better Living through Dread: Medieval Ascetics, Modern Philosophers, and the Long History of Existential Anxiety
Paul Megna
Pity & Poetics in Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”
Anne Schuurman
The Pathos of Reading
Mary A. Favret
Contaested Emotions: Pity & Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift & Wordsworth
Adam Potkay
Nat Turner and the Work of Enthusiasm
John Mac Kilgore
Facing Wilde: or, Emotion’s Image
Rochelle Rives
Emotion in Motion: The “Nātyashāstra”, Darwin, and Affect Theory
Vinay Dharwadker
The Scandal of Insensibility; or the Bartleby Problem
Wendy Anne Lee
Kafka’s Laughter: On Joy and the Kafkaesque
Anca Parvulescu
Theories & Methodologies
The Literariness of Literature & the History of Emotion
Sarah McNamer
Eschewing Politeness: Norbert Elias and the Historiography of Early Modern Affect
Gail Kern Paster
“Alas, Poor Yorick!”: Elegiac Friendship in “Tristram Shandy”
George Haggerty
The Logic of Emotionality
Katrin Pahl
Posthuman Compassion
Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield
The Changing Profession
Increasing Engagement in French & Francophone Studies: Structured Journaling on the Emotoins in La Fayette’s “La Princesse de Clèves”
Logan J. Connors
Professor Emily Casaubon Studies the Emotions
Blakey Vermeule
Feminist Politics of Emotions and Critical Digital Pedagogies: A Call to Action
Megan Boler
Correspondents at Large
Historicizing Emotions in Berline
Ute Frevert
Love, Fear, and Climate Change: Emotions in Drama & Performance
Peta Tait
Learning from Blindness
Chris Mounsey
Here on the Margins: My Academic Home
Patricia A. Matthew
Forum
Walking the Semipublic Talk
Julia Douthwaite
Co-edited by Miriam L. Wallace & A. A. Markley
Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745-1809.
British Literature in Context in the Long Eighteenth Century, Series Editor Jack Lynch
Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2012.
The first essay collection devoted to Thomas Holcroft’s life and work, this volume is a reassessment of his contributions to a remarkable range of literary genres—drama, poetry, fiction, autobiography, political philosophy. The contributors situate Holcroft’s self-fashioning as a member of London’s literati, his central role among the London radical reformers and intelligentsia, and his theatrical innovations within ongoing explorations of the late eighteenth-century public sphere of letters and debate.
Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel, 1790-1805. Bucknell University Press, 2009.
Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel engages ongoing debates on subject formation and rights discourse through the so-called "English Jacobin" novels. Ostensibly celebrating the universal rights-bearing subject, these political novels inadvertently also questioned the limitations of such universal conceptions. Including works by both men and women, and those normatively identified as radical alongside others considered more conservative or even "anti-Jacobin," this work examines the shared efforts to represent developing political consciousness and to inculcate such consciousness in readers across a reformist continuum. These novels' efforts to expand the citizen-subject threatened to reveal the cost implicit in accessing subjectivity on universal terms.
EnlighteningRomanticism, Romancing Enlightenment: British Fiction 1750-1830.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. (Essay Collection).
Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Adeline Mowbray, or the Mother and the Daughter by Mary Hays and Amelia Alderson Opie.
Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2004. (Augmented classroom edition).