The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
Speak, published in 1999, is a young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of high school freshman Melinda Sordino. After Melinda is raped at an end of summer party, she calls the police, who break up the party. Melinda is then ostracized by her peers because she will not say why she called the police. Unable to verbalize what happened, Melinda nearly stops speaking altogether, expressing her voice through the art she produces for Mr. Freeman's class. This expression slowly helps Melinda acknowledge what happened, face her problems, and recreate her identity.
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using principles of deconstruction.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is a 1960 children's novel by American writer Scott O'Dell, which tells the story of a girl named Karana, who is stranded alone for years on an island off the California coast. It is based on the true story of Juana Maria, a Nicoleño Native American left alone for 18 years on San Nicolas Island during the nineteenth century.
Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the French born British writer Violet Paget. She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music and travel.
Monique Wittig was a French author, philosopher, and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract." Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.
Victorian literature is English literature during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). The 19th century is considered by some the Golden Age of English Literature, especially for British novels. In the Victorian era, the novel became the leading literary genre in English. English writing from this era reflects the major transformations in most aspects of English life, from scientific, economic, and technological advances to changes in class structures and the role of religion in society. The number of new novels published each year increased from 100 at the start of the period to 1000 by the end of it. Famous novelists from this period include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, the three Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling.
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean is an 1857 novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his 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.
Gabrielle Michele Spiegel is an American historian of medieval France, and the former Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University where she served as chair for the history department for six years, and acting and interim dean of faculty. She also served as dean of humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004–2005, and, from 2008 to 2009, she was the president of the American Historical Association. In 2011, she was elected as a fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robyn R. Warhol is an American literary scholar, associated in particular with feminist narrative theory, of which she is considered one of the originators. She is currently an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University and a core faculty member of Project Narrative. Warhol received her BA in English from Pomona College in 1977 and her PhD in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1982, where she studied with Thomas Moser, George Dekker, and Ian Watt.
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Barbara Clare Foley is an American writer and the Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of six books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters, she has published on literary theory, academic politics, US proletarian literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the writers Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer. Throughout her career, her work has emphasized the centrality of antiracism and Marxist class analysis to both literary study and social movements.
Joanne Schultz Frye was a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specialized in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
Ruth Scodel is an American classicist. She is the D.R. Shackleton-Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Scodel specialises in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. Her research has been influenced by narrative theory, cognitive approaches, and politeness theory. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The narrative theory of equilibrium was proposed by Bulgarian narratologist Tzvetan Todorov in 1971. Todorov delineated this theory in an essay entitled The Two Principles of Narrative. The essay claims that all narratives contain the same five formal elements: equilibrium, disruption, recognition, resolution, and new equilibrium.
Karen L. Hellekson is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre, the topic of her 2001 book, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, and has also published on the author Cordwainer Smith. In fan studies, she is known for her work on fan fiction and the culture of the fan community. She has co-edited two essay collections on fan fiction with Kristina Busse, and in 2008, co-founded the academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, also with Busse.
Empathy, as an interdisciplinary concept, usually studied within social and psychological context, plays an important role in consuming literature and fiction in particular. This concept is known as narrative empathy. Defined by Taylor et al. in 2002–2003, individuals experience narrative empathy when they are able to feel with, take the perspectives of, or experience a simulation with the likeness thereof a character within that narrative. When looking at empathy in literature, there are two main concepts that can be looked at. Learning empathy through literature, or narrative empathy, is more thoroughly and academically studied than narratives of empathy, which are prevalent across various types of fiction.
Julia Sun-Joo Lee is an American writer and professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. She studies African-American literature. Outside of academia, she has published a romance novel under a pen name.
