photo by Dan Addison

Cynthia Wall

(1994)
Professor
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
Chair of the Department

Degrees

Ph.D. Chicago, 1992
M.A. Chicago, 1987
M.A. Northwestern (Phil.), 1983
B.A. St. Olaf College, 1981

Books

  • The Business of Houses (in progress)
  • Editor of John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (Norton Critical Edition, forthcoming 2008)
  • The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
  • Editor, Blackwell's Concise Companion to the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (Blackwell, 2004)
  • Editor of Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin Classics, 2003)
  • Editor, with Dennis Todd, Eighteenth-Century Genres and Cultures; Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter (University of Delaware Press, 2001)
  • The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  • Editor of Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (Bedford Cultural Editions, 1998)

Articles

  • “Domesticities and Novel Narratives,” The Cambridge History of the English Novel, ed. Clement Hawes and Robert Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010)
  • “Defoe and the European Novel,” The Cambridge Companion to the European Novel, ed. Michael Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010)
  • “Description, Including Ekphrasis,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Efrain Kristal (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2010)
  • “The Narration of London,” The Cambridge Companion to London, ed. Lawrence Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010)
  • “Defoe and London,” The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. John J. Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2008)
  • “‘Chasms in the Story’:  Sophia Lee’s The Recess and David Hume’s History of England,” in Imagining Selves: Essays in Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed. Rivka Swensen and Elise Lauterbach (University of Delaware Press, forthcoming 2008)
  • “Poetic Spaces,” The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  • “The Castle of Otranto: A Shakespeareo-Political Satire?” in Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman, ed. Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007): 184-198
  • "Teaching Space in Sir Charles Grandison," MLA Approaches to Teaching Samuel Richardson, ed. Jocelyn Harris and Lisa Zunshine (2006)
  • "A Geography of Georgian Narrative Space," Georgian Geographies, ed. Miles Ogborn and Charles Withers (Forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2002)
  • "'Over-against Catharine-Street in the Strand': Forms of Address in London Streets," The Streets of London, ed. Tim Hitchcock (forthcoming, London: Rivers Oram, 2002)
  • "The Spaces of Clarissa in Text and Film," Eighteenth Century Fiction on Screen, ed. Robert Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106-22
  • "The Rhetoric of Description," Eighteenth-Century Genres and Cultures, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001)
  • "Details of Space: Narrative Description in Early Eighteenth-Century Novels," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 4 (July 1998), 387-405
  • "Novel Streets: The Rebuilding of London and Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year," Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 164-177
  • "Grammars of Space: The Language of London from Stow's Survey to Defoe's Tour," Philological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (Fall 1997), 387-411
  • "The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings," Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 1-25
  • "Gendering Rooms: Domestic Architecture and Literary Acts," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5, no.4 (July 1993), 349-72
  • "'Her Conversation heavenly': Defoe's Architectural Dialogues and the Academy for Women," in Compendious Conversations, ed. Kevin Cope Lang (New York: Peter Lang, 1992) 237-238

Reviews

  • Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Eighteenth-Century Life (forthcoming)
  • Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), Modern Philology (forthcoming)
  • Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Studies in Romanticism (forthcoming)
  • Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Summer 2008)
  • “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 46:3 (Summer 2006): 657-733
  • Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2005)
  • Sarah Jordan, Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Bucknell, 2003), The Scriblerian 36:2 (Spring 2004): 191-92
  • James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (Cambridge, 2002), Albion 35:2 (Summer 2003): 293-94
  • Lena Cowen Orlin, ed. Material London: ca. 1600 (University of Pennsylvania, 2000), Shakespeare Studies, Volume 30
  • Richard Lehan, The City in Literature:  An Intellectual and Cultural History (California, 1998), The Scriblerian 31, no. 2 and 32, no. 1 (Spring and Autumn 1999)
  • Stuart Sherman, Telling Time (Chicago, 1996), Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 4 (Summer 1998)

Honors

  • Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, for The Prose of Things, Modern Language Association 2007.
  • NEH Fellowship, 2003-2004
  • University of Virginia sesquicentennial, 2003-2004
  • Newberry Library/ASECS Fellowship, May 2001
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1998-1999
  • University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Fellowship, 1998-1999
  • Newberry Library/British Academy Fellowship, Summer 1997
  • NEH Summer Stipend, 1994
  • Huntington Library visiting fellowship, 1994
  • William Andrews Clark Library visiting fellowship, 1994
  • Houghton Library visiting fellowship, 1994
  • NEH Summer Seminar, 1993
  • Marc Perry Galler Prize, University of Chicago, 1993
  • Newberry Library research fellowship, 1991-1992