My research focuses on the history and theory of the novel, particularly in the long eighteenth century. This work is informed by formalist and feminist literary theory.
My academic writing has appeared in venues such as NOVEL, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
I am interested in questions of form across literature and culture. Currently, I am working on a book about the intersection of literary and legal personhood and another—for a wider audience—about Jane Austen as storyteller (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025).
born yesterday: inexperience and the early realist novel
“Intelligent and sharply stylish.” — Jenny Davidson
“The finest study of literary character in a generation.” — Jonathan Kramnick
“An exciting, original reassessment of the relationship between plot and character in realism” —Deidre Lynch
“It is the rare and best kind of monograph that makes you laugh!” — Novel
“Intellectually serious but also gracefully playful in a way uncommon in academic writing.” — LARB
“Most likely to make a lasting impact on the way we think about eighteenth-century novels . . . handsome, humanely written and accessible . . . cheerfully revisionary. . .” Times Literary Supplement
“Lively and brimming with wit.” — Eighteenth-Century Studies
“This exciting and invigorating work of scholarship will doubtless prove beneficial both to researchers and to teachers.” — Eighteenth-Century Fiction
selected essays:
“Clarissa by the Numbers: Novel Experience and the Aesthetics of Quantification,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2023)
“The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2020)
“Clarissa’s Conjectural History: The Novel and the Novice,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (2015)
“When Experience Matters: Tom Jones and ‘Virtue Rewarded’,” in Novel (2014)
recent reviews:
Review of Devoney Looser’s Sister Novelists and Lindsay Eckert’s The Limits of Familiarity in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Review of Thomas Manganaro’s Against Better Judgment in Studies in the Novel
Review of Wendy Anne Lee, Failures of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Jane Austen’s Emma
My edition of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) was published in W.W. Norton’s Norton Library series in April 2022. It includes a new introduction and afterword, along with explanatory notes.
My edition of Sense and Sensibility, also from The Norton Library, will be published in 2024.
I’ve visited a number of classrooms and book groups to discuss editing Austen. If you’d like me to visit your group, drop me a line through the contact page.