Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

My work has been informed by the notion that literature, and the interpretive tools of literary criticism, help explain the world outside of literature. In my first book, The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, I focused on how allegory, as a highly self-conscious literary mode of representation, intersected with and challenged prevailing ideas about the nature of an author's work and, more broadly, of the place of work in nineteenth-century American society. My second book, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century Literature, analyzes the literary notion of sympathy in relation to nineteenth-century ideals of sympathy, specifically maternal love. While writing it, I also edited The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe. My third monograph, Narrative Strains: The Problem of Facts in Fiction, similarly considers the relations between literature (and the visual arts, as well) and culture. How narrative works (or doesn't) is the question I take up in works from Poe to Dos Passos, Riis to Crane. The book attempts to clarify, to those not necessarily in literary studies, one of its most fundamental terms - narrative - and the tools and methods that a literary critic might bring to her analysis of a text. My specific goal is to think about how texts, both literary and non-literary, open up and experiment with the category of narrative. More generally, I want to demonstrate how representational modes that are conventionally understood as antithetical (numbers/words; photographs/statistics; facts/fictions) are better understood in conversation with one another.