Excellent scholarship by Marah Gubar, Claudia Nelson, Victoria Ford Smith, M. O. Grenby, Alexandra Valint, and others has more than demonstrated the importance of children’s literature to nineteenth-century culture more broadly. My first book contributed to that conversation, arguing that Romantic-era children’s tales helped shape the reading habits of the Victorians. Last summer, I signed
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
Like most professors, I don’t usually teach during the summers. But that doesn’t mean we don’t work. In fact, since so much time during the semester is taken up with planning classes, grading papers, and meetings (with students, committees, etc.), the summer might be when the most academic work gets done — if by academic