Scholarship
Current Projects
Speaking Subjects and Criminal Conversations
This project explores the intersection of variant discursive fields, particularly oratory and public political speech, and fictive and legal discourses. I'm interested in metaphors of translation, ventriloquism, and linguistic "passing" as connected to the advent of a public political realm that aimed to reform political or legal institutions. Sites where spoken or written language are construed as improper, illicit, or even criminal in the later eighteenth century are of particular interest: trials for "constructive" treason or "criminal conversation" and other legal fictions, suspicion towards silence where speech is compelled or its truthfulness a matter of oaths, translations into English and theoretical statements on the function of translation, restrictively gendered or raced rhetoric (i.e. attacks on some kinds of speech as "effeminate," representations of dialect that authorizes or deauthorizes the speaker), women's engagement with legal speech in fiction, canting speech and canting dictionaries, grammars or oratory instruction directed to those excluded from certain kinds of speaking or writing, representations and documentation of societies for debate and spouting societies. I'm also working on problems of embodied speech, from period elocution handbooks and John Thelwall's writing on speech impediments, to satirical prints of speakers both institutionally authorized and those depicted as illicit. Finally, I'm interested in the way that rethinking speech by attending also to the corporeal aspects of the speaking subject places the emphasis not solely on language as the actor, but on the speaking body as a site where culture is made.
Reviews of Re-Viewing Thomas Holcroft, 1745–1809: Essays on His Work and Life
"...an excellent collection surveying Holcroft's wide-ranging career as a novelist, translator, reviewer, playwright, theatre critic, and autobiographer. The contributors sustain attention to the formal relevance of Holcroft's working-class background, his development as a self-educated intellectual, and his life-long commitment to the rights of the populace as a whole." Frederick Burwick, in Romanticism 20.2 (April 2014): 86–88.
"...a valuable contribution to the study of literature of the 1790s, but it does more in offering a reassessment of an author whose neglect at the hands of critics is difficult to account for. The volume succeeds in establishing Holcroft's significance in the reformist literary-intellectual culture of late eighteenth-century Britain" Jennifer Golightly, Restoration and 18th-Century Theatre Research, 27.1 (Summer 2012): 111–15.
"This collection of 12 essays does much to evaluate the largeness of Holcroft, and is broad, searching, interesting, and accessible. [...] a key text in Holcroft studies. It will appeal to any scholar of labouring class writing; political philosophy of the 1790s; the Georgian Theatre; life-writing; the novel; and poetry of the long eighteenth-century. [...] what comes across most strongly in this collection is Holcroft's progressiveness." in The Review of English Studies First published online August 20, 2013. doi:10.1093/res/hgt054
Reviews of Revolutionary Subjects in the English "Jacobin" Novel
"Sharp and cogent..." – Ian Duncan. "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 50.4 (2010): 895-932. See 907–908. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Jun. 2010. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>. 908.
"Wallace's book is an important contribution to [the] work of cultural recovery, including insightful and probing analyses both of understudied literary texts and more familiar ones, as well as a sophisticated theoretical framework in which to view them together...Wallace's book is an indispensible contribution to the study of the revolutionary era and will be welcomed by scholars of the period for its cogent analyses as well as for its carefully wrought depiction of a culture whose concerns, vibrantly and forcefully articulated in their own time, continue to be so strikingly relevant today."– Amy Garnai, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction23.3 (2010): 438–440. 440.
Tony Jarrells, Review: Revolutionary Subjects, NBOL (Dec. 30, 2010): np. <http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=124>
"Thoroughly historicized and thoughtfully theorized..." – Shawn Lisa Maurer, in TSWL, 29.2 (Fall 2010): 464–66.
"Both Wallace books [Revolutionary Subjects and Enlightening Romanticism] will surely establish themselves as important contributions to revivifying the study of the romantic-era novel. The most effective aspect of her method is that it sets up a three-way conversation between a historicist concerned with outlining, accurately, the revolutionary struggle to articulate political agency in a new way; a theorist alert to present consequences; and the novels, which are allowed to speak for themselves." – Robert Miles, in Eighteenth-Century Life, 36.1 (2012): 149-154. Project MUSE. Web. 11 Jun. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>. 153.
Steve Moyer, "Hey, Who You Callin' a Jacobin?" Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities 31.4 (July/August 2010): np. <http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/julyaugust/curio/hey-who-you-callin-jacobin>
"Revolutionary Subjects is a groundbreaking work that makes a major contribution to our understanding of the period’s fiction. Wallace [...] persuasively demonstrates that the Jacobin novels, despite their wide stylistic, thematic, and ideological range, collectively share a central concern with the limitations and precariousness of prevailing liberal conceptions of political rights. [...] Anyone working on the period’s fiction (including, I’d suggest, authors outside the scope of this study such as Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott) will need to engage with Wallace’s argument." –Michael Verderame, in The Eighteenth Century, 53.1 (Spring 2012): 129–133. 133.
Reviews of Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment
"Although its starting point is a choice between ‘‘Romanticism’’ and ‘‘the enlightenment,’’ the collection goes far toward illuminating the historical, ideological, and formal tensions that helped produce the novel during the crucial period between Fielding and Dickens—a period that may even, this book does much to suggest, deserve a name of its own." – Brian Goldberg, in European Legacy, 6.4 (2011): 539–574.
"supports and extends the growing critical consensus that, when it comes to understanding the literature and culture of 'the long eighteenth century,' we have more to gain by highlighting the continuities, rather than exaggerating the disjunctions, between the Enlightenment and the Romantic era." – Evan Gottlieb, in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era.
Tony Jarrells, Review: Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment, NBOL (Dec. 14, 2010): np. <http://www.nbol-19.org/view_doc.php?index=53>
Robert Miles. Review Essay: "Subjectivity in the Romantic-Era Novel." Eighteenth-Century Life 36.1 (2012): 149-154. Project MUSE. Web. 11 Jun. 2012. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Other Reviews
Pascal Fischer, Review: The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, in Anglia 130.4 (Dec. 2012): 586–88.
R. V. Jones, Review: The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain in Urban History 40.3 (2013): 584–586.
Katrina Navickas, Review of The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, in Reviews in History, (review no. 1249). URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1249 Date accessed: 11 June, 2012.
Howard D. Weinbrot, "Review: The Gordon Riots Redivivus," Huntington Library Quarterly 75.4 ( 2013):615-620.