Cindy A. Weinstein

Professor of English

Research interests

19th-century American literature and culture.

Research Statement

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.

Publications

Book Projects

• Narratives, Numbers, and Pictures: From Poe to Dos Passos

Books

• Introduction to the Oxford Classical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
• The Concise Companion to American Literature, 1900-1950, co-edited with Peter Stoneley (Blackwell, forthcoming)
• Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Cambridge University Press (December 2004).
• The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, editor. Cambridge University Press (2004).
• The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in NineteenthCentury American Fiction, Cambridge University Press (1995).

Articles and Essays

• "The Slave Narrative and Sentimental Literature," in The Cambridge Companion to Slave Narratives, ed. Audrey Fisch (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
• "Artist at Work: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre," in Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Blackwell, 2006)
• "Crane and the Body Count," in What Democracy Looks Like: A New Realism for a Post-Seattle World, ed. Cecelia Tichi and Amy Lang (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 53-67.
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Birth-mark," essays for American History through Literature, ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer (New York: Scribner?s, 2006).
• "From True Woman to New Woman to Virgin," in Henry Adams and the Need to Know, ed. William Merrill Decker and Earl N. Harbert (University of Virginia Press, 2005), 300-314.
• "We are Family: Melville?s Pierre," Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 7, no. 1 (March, 2005): 19-40.
• The Norton Critical Edition of The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, ed. Leland Person (2005). Reprint from The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, 82-86.
• "Labor and Fiction," Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, ed. Shirley Samuels, Blackwell's (October 2004).
• "Uncle Tom's Cabin and the South," in The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cambridge University Press (June 2004).
• "How Many Others are there in the Other Half? Jacob Riis and the Tenement Population," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2002 Vol. 24 (2): 195-216.
• "`A Sort of Adopted Daughter': Family Relations in The Lamplighter," ELH 68 (2001): 1023-1047.
• "Melville, Labor, and the Discourses of Reception," The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine, Cambridge University Press (1998): 202--223.
• "From True Woman to New Woman: Henry Adams and Women," Henry Adams Newsletter 5, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 110.
• "Melville at the Machine of Allegory," Praxis, (1990): 109127.
• The Calm Before the Storm: Laboring through Mardi. American Literature 65 (1993): 239--253.
• "The Invisible Hand Made Visible -- 'The Birth-mark,'" Nineteenth-Century Literature 48, no. 1 (1993): 44-73.