Alison Booth

(1986)

Professor

Victorian, Feminist Criticism, Narrative Theory, Biography, Literary Tourism

Degrees

Ph.D. Princeton, 1986

M.A. Princeton, 1983

M.F.A. Cornell, 1979

B.A. Bennington, 1976

Interests

I enjoy teaching courses in Victorian fiction, women novelists, gothic, narrative theory, and auto/biography. Most of my research has concerned narratives of collective history, from the reconception of a common life and a female literary tradition by George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to the imagined community figured in the portrait sculptures on Mount Rushmore. I have persistently worked across the boundaries of period and nationality in literary history. In the past decade I have united my interests in feminist historiography and narrative theory with archival research to recover a popular form of publication during the nineteenth century, the collection of representative biographies of women. I continue to retrieve illustrated collections of biographical portraits in my current project, a study of the "homes and haunts" genre, literary tourism, and author's houses.

Books

  • Wuthering Heights: A Cultural Edition, ed. Alison Booth.  New York: Longman, 2009. (publication winter 2008).
  • Co-editor, with Jerome Beaty, Paul Hunter, and Kelly Mays, Norton Introduction to Literature, 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. 10th ed. forthcoming 2009.
  • How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, in Women in Culture and Society, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Winner of the Barbara Penny Kanner Award.
  • Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
  • Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, in Reading Woman Writing Series, ed. Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography of Collective Biographies of Women, 1830-1940. Based on bibliography of 930 collections in How to Make It as a Woman.

Selected Articles Since 1995

  • “Life Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to British Literature 1837-1914, ed. Joanne Shattock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009.
  • “Dickens Country, Dickens World, and Dickensian Time Travel,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola J. Watson. London: Palgrave, forthcoming.    
  • “Author Country: Longfellow, the Brontës, and Anglophone Homes and Haunts,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, forthcoming 2008.
  • “Revisiting the Homes and Haunts of Mary Russell Mitford,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, forthcoming 2008.
  • “Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10:2 (2005): 267-79.
  • “Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni.  London: Ashgate, 2005.  41-66. 
  • “The Changing Faces of Mount Rushmore: Collective Portraiture and Participatory National Heritage,” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.  337-55. 
  • “The Real Right Place of Henry James: Homes and Haunts,” The Henry James Review 25 (2004): 216-27.
  • “Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 284-310.
  • “The Lessons of the Medusa: Anna Jameson and Collective Biographies of Women,” Victorian Studies 42:2 (Winter 1999/2000): 257-88.
  • “The Scent of a Narrative: Rank Discourse in Flush and Written on the Body," Narrative 8 (January 2000): 3-22.
  • “The Mother of All Cultures: Camille Paglia and Feminist Mythologies,” The Kenyon Review 21 (1999): 27-45.
  • "Illustrious Company: Victoria Among Other Women in Anglo-American Role Model Anthologies," in Remaking Queen Victoria, ed. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.  59-78.
  • "From Miranda to Prospero: The Works of Fanny Kemble," Victorian Studies (Winter, 1995): 227-54.

Selected Lectures and Conferences (Since 2002)

  • Keynote: “Transatlantic Author Country,” Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, Institute for English Studies, University of London, 8 June 2007.
  • Keynote: “The Likes of Sister Dora: Representing Eminent Victorian Women,” Victorians Institute, 21 October 2006.
  • Featured Workshop: “Literature Travels, but the Author Is Always at Home,” North American Victorian Studies Conf, 1 Sept. 2006.
  • Invited Lecture: “A Guide to Prosopography: Collecting Authors’ Homes and Haunts,” Department of English, UCLA, 23 January 2003.
  • Session Organizer: “Sketches from Life,” Autobiography, Biography and Life Writing Division, MLA, 2007.
  • Seminar Organizer: “The Author Business,” Modernist Studies Association 7, Chicago, 3 November 2005.“Living Periodically,” Victorian Division Panel, MLA Convention, 2005.
  • “Ghosts, Relics, and Replicas: Dickensian Homes and Haunts,” Dickens Project, 2005.
  • “A Grammar of Literary Pilgrimage,” Narrative Conference, 7-10 April 2005.
  • ”National Gothic, or Literary Homes and Haunts,” INCS, London, 11 July 2003.
  • “Homes and Haunts, or Gothic Life Narratives,” Narrative, 29 March 2003.
  • “The Real Right Place: Henry James and Homes and Haunts,” MLA, 2002.
  • “Class and the Houses of Authorship,” Modernist Studies Assoc., 2002.
  • “Compulsory Typology: Generations of Historical Women,” International Autobiography and Biography Assoc., Melbourne, Australia, 15-19 July 2002.
  • “The Author in the House: A Woman’s Guide to British Literary Geography,” British Women Writers Conference, 18-21 April 2002.
  • “Collecting Authoriana: Carlyle’s House and the Literary Museum,” INCS, 2002.

Selected Awards and Professional Activity

  • Professor, Bread Loaf School of English, summer 2006, 2008.
  • Project Coordinator, Center for the Liberal Arts, 2003-present (Short courses for high school English teachers in the area and state).
  • Barbara Penny Kanner Award for Bibliomethodology, Western Association of Women Historians, for How to Make It as a Woman.
  • Fellow, Virginia Center for the Humanities, 1993.
  • President, Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, 2005.  Perkins Prize Committee for Best Book on Narrative, 2006-2007.
  • Conference Co-organizer: 3rd Annual North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Virginia, 30 September-2 October 2005.
  • “The Margins and Settings of Life-Writing,” University of Virginia, February 22-23, 2002.
  • Editorial Boards: University of Virginia Press, 2005-07; Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies; LIT; Lifewriting Annual.
  • MLA: Executive Committee, Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing 2006-present  ; Member, Lowell Prize Committee, 2007; Chair, 2008; Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, 1996-1998; Chair, Committee on Honors and Awards, 1997-1998.