I ended up submitting the blog post I’d planned for here to the local paper, so you can read that version here: https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2018/10/26/after-200-years-frankenstein-still-matters-opinion/1779830002/ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of my favorite books to teach. Last fall I taught a course on the novel, and it’s a mainstay on my syllabi from the British survey to Romanticism to
My book about Disney’s Victorians includes a chapter about Hans Christian Andersen, locating him among other eminent Victorians (including Dickens, the Brownings, Eliot, and Yonge) and exploring the relationship between biography and adaptation. Among the most intriguing aspects of Andersen’s life, as nearly all biographers point out, is his sexuality, and this week I’m thinking about
It has been almost a year since I last posted on this blog, and it had been almost a year before that post, too. Excuses abound (a first child, a new job, a new house in a new city), but I’m recommitting to posting here more regularly. I am partly inspired by Dan Cohen’s essay from