Audrey Jaffe

Professor Jaffe's research and teaching focus on the Victorian novel. Her most recent book, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (2016), argues for the real as an object of desire-and hence fantastical construction-in Victorian fiction. Scenes of Sympathy (2000) reconceived Victorian sympathy as an imagined exchange of social and class identities. She has also written about the relation between the stock market, Victorian finance, and the measurement of emotion (The Affective Life of the Average Man; 2010) and the idea of omniscience in Dickens (Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience; 1991). She is co-editor, with Elaine Hadley and Sarah Winter, of From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019).

Professor Jaffe regularly teaches English 324--a year-long undergraduate course on British fiction-as well as a variety of courses and seminars on such topics as Victorian realism; Victorian character; affect and the novel; the novel and everyday life; sociology and the novel, and the construction of space and place in Victorian realist fiction.

Office Hours

Fall 2023  T 12-2 and by appt.

Publications

Books

Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter, eds., From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019).  

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (Oxford UP, 2016)

The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Ohio State, 2010)

Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 2000)

Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (U. of California, 1991)

Recent Essays

“Recognizing Romola.” Novel 54:2 (2021), 227-247.

“Goffman Goes to Middlemarch.”  In Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke, eds., The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain (Routledge, 2020), 120-35.

“’When a House is So Much More:’  Character, Tenancy, and Property in Victorian Fiction.”   In Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter, eds., From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019), 153-72.

"Affect and the Victorian Novel." In Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Affect and Textual Criticism (Palgrave, 2017), 713-34.

"'Outside the Gates of Everything': Hardy's Exclusionary Realism," Novel 43:3 (2010)