Web-Accessible Publications

 

"Cultural Patchwork in the Classroom: Shelley Jackson, Tom Stoppard, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling Rewrite the Romantics." Romanticism and Contemporary Culture. Ed. Laura Mandell and Michael Eberle-Sinatra. (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, February, 2002).

Abstract: Jay Clayton's essay documents, with brio and scholarly rigor, his attempts at bringing together Romantic literature and popular culture in a classroom environment. Clayton explores three modern texts - Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia - and their relationship to, and usefulness in, teaching Romanticism. He offers a critical reading of these texts and addresses questions of history, genre and periodization.

[Note: Subscribers of The Chronicle of Higher Education can read an article about this essay, published on Friday, March 22, 2002.]

"Dickens and the Genealogy of Postmodernism."  Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991): 181-95.

Abstract: This article notes the omission of Charles Dickens and other British nineteenth-century writers from the theoretical discourse on postmodernism.  Given the significant role played by nineteenth- century continental poets, novelists, and philosophers in postmodern theory, the article asks how the absence of Victorian culture from accounts of the emergence of postmodernism aids in the constitution of this powerful contemporary discourse.  After tracing a range of postmodern features in the works of Dickens, it relates them to aspects of the 1830s that anticipate the economic conditions of advanced capitalism.  It contrasts these apparently postmodern features with four new historicist accounts of the novelist that identify his work in the 1830s with a shift between two early stages of capitalism.  It concludes that both postmodern theorists and recent historicist critics of Dickens have excluded a range of historical questions that would challenge some of their assumptions.  Seeing affinities between nineteenth-century British writing and postmodernism would force critics to reassess the historical models that inform currently influential periodizations.