Areas of Interest
- Victorian literature and culture
- Literature and science
- Literary theory
- Contemporary British and American women writers
Publications
Books
Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
Editor, The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007
Toni Morrison. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998
Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995
Publications - Recent Essays
"George Eliot" in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, ed. Adrian Poole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
"Historicizing Trauma: The Genealogy of Psychic Shock in Daniel Deronda." Victorian Literature and Culture 36 (2008) 121-140
"Victorian Framings of the Mind: Recent Work on Mid-Nineteenth Century Theories of Consciousness, Memory, and Emotion." Literature Compass 4:4, 2007 1257-1276
“Emergent Theories of Victorian Mind Shock: From War and Railway Accident to Nerves, Electricity and Emotion.” in Neurology and Literature 1860-1920, ed. Anne Stiles. Houndmills, Basingstoke: MacMillan Palgrave, 2007. 163-84
“Mary Barton and North and South.” The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20067
“Collaboration and Collusion: Two Victorian Couples and their Orientalist Texts” in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship. Ed Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
“ ‘Strong Family Likeness’: Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës. Ed. Heather Glen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 99-121
“Trauma, Memory and Railway Disaster: The Dickensian Connection.” Victorian Studies 43 (2001) 413-436.
Current Research
Histories of emotion; theories of late style.