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Jonathan Hamilton Grossman (born April 17, 1967) is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). [1] He specializes in nineteenth-century British literature.
Grossman was born in Oxford, England, in 1967 to Marc and Penelope Grossman. He attended Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and religion from Brown University in 1989, and his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996.
Grossman's first book, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2002. The book examines early nineteenth-century crime fiction's relation to the law courts prior to detective fiction's invention in the 1840s. It falls into the interdisciplinary field of law and literature as well as early Victorian studies.
Charles Dickens's Networks: Public transport and the Novel (Oxford), his second book, examines the history of public transport's systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space, and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding that revolution. Focusing on a trio of road novels by Charles Dickens, this study looks first at a key historical moment in the networked community's coming together, then at a subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.
Since 2011, Grossman has been co-editor of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Grossman's academic interests include the history, form, and sociology of the novel, and narrative and temporality.
In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood, in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung ("education") and Roman ("novel").
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.
The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, or Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British where appropriate.
Frances Milton Trollope, also known as Fanny Trollope, was an English novelist and writer who published as Mrs. Trollope or Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) is the best known. She also wrote social novels: one against slavery said to have influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first industrial novel, and two anti-Catholic novels that used a Protestant position to examine self-making. Some recent scholars note how modernist critics exclude women writers such as Frances Trollope from consideration. In 1839, The New Monthly Magazine claimed, "No other author of the present day has been at once so read, so much admired, and so much abused". Two of her sons, Thomas Adolphus and Anthony, became writers. Her daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope, second wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope, was also a novelist.
Victorian literature refers to English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). English writing from this era reflects the major transformation in most aspects of English life, such as significant scientific, economic, and technological advances to changes in class structures and the role of religion in society. While the Romantic period was a time of abstract expression and inward focus, essayists, poets, and novelists during the Victorian era began to reflect and comment on realities of the day, including criticisms of the dangers of factory work, the plight of the lower class, and the treatment of women and children. Prominent examples include poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and novelists Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Barrett's poem entitled "Cry of the Children," published in 1844, focused on the horrific conditions faced by children working in factories. The popularity of the poem served to shed light on important social and political issues of the day, while also furthering the cause of feminism—cementing her standing as a successful and renowned female poet in a male-dominated world. Dickens employed humour and an approachable tone while addressing social problems such as wealth disparity. Hardy used his novels to question religion and social structures.
Christian literature is writing that deals with Christian themes and incorporates the Christian world view. This constitutes a huge body of extremely varied writing.
Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature. Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences.
The social novel, also known as the social problemnovel, is a "work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel". More specific examples of social problems that are addressed in such works include poverty, conditions in factories and mines, the plight of child labor, violence against women, rising criminality, and epidemics because of over-crowding, and poor sanitation in cities.
Stephen Thomas Knight MA (Oxon.), PhD (Sydney), F.A.H.A., F.E.A. was, until September 2011, a distinguished research professor in English literature at Cardiff University; and is a professorial fellow of Literature at the University of Melbourne. His areas of expertise include medieval English and European literature, Robin Hood, Merlin, cultural studies, crime fiction, and Australian matters. He has authored over thirty books, and is well known in the public sphere for his contribution to a range of fields. His most recent books have been The Politics of Myth (2015), Towards Sherlock Holmes: A Thematic History of Crime Fiction in the 19th Century World (2017), Australian Crime Fiction: A 200-year History (2018), The Fiction of G.W.M. Reynolds: The Man Who Outsold Dickens (2019) and The University is Closed for Open Day: Themes and Scenes from 21st Century Australia (2019).
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
Literature broadly is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his pioneering work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Peter Ackroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charles Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Murray (Meir) Roston is an Israeli Emeritus professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University.
Richard Stang was an American literary critic, author, scholar, and professor whose groundbreaking insights on the nineteenth-century English novel have shaped the attitudes of subsequent writers and critics for more than five decades. He was the first critic to recognize and document the sophistication of contemporary mid-Victorian criticism of the novel, and to show that it in effect amounted to a holistic aesthetics of fiction for the English novel in the mid-century.
Jeremy Tambling is a British writer and critic. He was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong until 2006 and then Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester until December 2013. His most recent position is Professor of English at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw (2019).
John Lucas is a poet, critic, biographer, anthologist and literary historian. He runs a poetry publishers called Shoestring Press, and he is the author of 92 Acharnon Street, which won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award in 2008.
Nicola Anne Lulham Bradbury D. Phil. is an English literary critic, lecturer, editor, and author, specializing in the 19th century novel.
Jon Michael Varese is an American novelist and literary historian. He published his debut novel, The Spirit Photographer, in 2018; it is set in the Reconstruction era in Boston, Massachusetts and in Louisiana plantation country.
Ronald R. Thomas is an American academic administrator who served as the 13th president of the University of Puget Sound. He held faculty and administrative appointments at University of Chicago, Harvard University, Trinity College, and the University of Puget Sound.
