Department of English at the University of Virginia

Interests

My primary interest is in feminist theory and, more generally, issues of gender and sexuality whether in a theoretical context or within primary texts from Mansfield Park to Pulp Fiction.  My book on narratives of female development features chapters on Frances Burney and Jane Austen among others—and Austen is the single figure to whom I find myself returning most frequently.  I have edited the Norton Critical edition of Northanger Abbey and had something to say in print about most of Austen’s novels.   At the same time, my teaching and scholarship have shifted increasingly to consider popular and academic culture in the United States today.  Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003) is a feminist critique of such contemporary artists and intellectuals as Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Andrew Ross, and Edward Said.  As this book suggests, my current interests include recent cinema and the late twentieth-century academy.  Though I continue to focus on narrative forms, today my archive extends from novels, movies, and academic writing to reality television, decorating manuals, and women’s magazines.  My newest project is on a mode I call “shelter writing”: writing that clings to domestic spaces, objects, and practices in the aftermath of dislocation.

Books

• Editor, Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
• Cool Men and the Second Sex.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
• Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development.  New York: Columbia University Press (Gender and Culture Series), 1993.

Articles and Reviews

• “Family Plots: Domestic and Dynastic Fiction.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 3: 1820-1880.  Ed. John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor (forthcoming).
• Review of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present.  In Modern Philology (forthcoming).
• “The Mixed News for Women in Academe: Feminization, Privatization, and the New Women’s Studies.” Special issue of South Atlantic Review.  Ed. Barbara Ladd (Fall 2008).
• “Feminist Theory and Real Women,” special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Changing University” (forthcoming).
• “Shelter Writing: Desperate Housewives from Crusoe to Queer Eye.” New Literary History 37.2 (2006).
• Review of Bill Brown, ed. Things and Suzanne Juhasz, A Desire for Women: Relational Psychoanalysis, Writing, and Relationships Between Women.  In American Literature 77.1 (2005.)
• Review of Sarah Brown, Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature.  In Victorian Studies 48.1 (2005).
• Review of George Butte, I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie.  In Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17.2 (2005).
• “Dark Austen.” Re-Drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland.  Ed. Beatrice Battaglia and Diego Saglia (Naples: Liguori, 2004).
• “Response to Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s ‘From Rereading to Reading.’” PMLA 119.2 (2004).
• “Cuban Entries.”  Callaloo 26.1 (2003).
• “Andrew Ross, Cultural Studies, and Feminism.”  the minnesota review  52-54 (2001).
• “Feminism Today: Mothers, Daughters, Emerging Sisters."  American Literary History 11.3 (Fall 1999).
• “Rachel Crothers.”  American National Biography.  Ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes.  Oxford University Press, 1999.
• “Getting Waylaid in Evelina.”  Norton Critical Edition of Evelina.  Ed. Stewart J. Cooke.  Norton, 1998.
• “’Diversity’ in Adversity: The Retreat from Affirmative Action.”  NWSA Journal 9.1 (Spring 1997).
• “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism.”   Critical Inquiry 21.4 (summer 1995).
• “Jane Eyre’s Fall from Grace.”  Jane Eyre: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism.  Ed. Beth Newman.  St. Martin’s, 1995.
• Review of Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words.  In American Quarterly 47.4 (December 1995).
• Review of Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture.  In Discourse 17.2 (Winter 1994-1995).
• “Geometries of Race and Gender: Eve Sedgwick, Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault.”  Feminist Studies 20.1  (Spring 1994).
• Review of Janet Gezari, Charlotte Bronte and Defensive Conduct and Carol Bock, Charlotte Bronte and the Storyteller’s Audience.  In Victorian Studies 37.2 (Winter 1994).
•  “The Mill on the Floss, the Critics, and the Bildungsroman.”  PMLA 108 (1993).
• Review of Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy and Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels.  In Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21. 1 (Spring 1993).
• “Crashing the Party: Women and the Academy Now.”   Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities.  Ed. Mark Edmundson.  Viking, 1993.
• “Peevish Accents in the Juvenilia: A Feminist Key to Pride and Prejudice.”  Approaches to Teaching Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  Ed. Marcia Folsom.  MLA, 1993.
• “The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennet.”  Refiguring the Father.  Ed. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace.  Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.

Selected Service and Honors

• Advisory Editor, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters
• Advisory Board, LGBT Resource Center at UVA
• Advisory Board, Staff Union at UVA
• Executive Council of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, 2000-2004
• Sesquicentennial Fellow, UVA Center for Advanced Studies, 2000-2001, 1996-1997
• Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship (Modern Language Association), 1993
• Fulbright Fellow, 1978-1979