Faculty
Areas of Specialization
- 18th-Century British Literature
- 19th-Century British Literature
- American Literature
- Bibliography and Textual Studies
- Digital Literacies and Literature
- Creative Writing
- Cultural Studies
- Drama
- Ethnic and Third-World Literature
- Folklore
- Language and Linguistics
- Literary Theory
- Medieval Studies
- Modern British Literature
- Poetry and Poetics
- Popular Culture
- Renaissance Literature
- Rhetoric
- Women, Gender, and Literature
Bibliography and Textual Studies
Drawing on the rich printed and manuscript resources of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the department has a long tradition of teaching and practicing bibliographical scholarship and textual studies.
In recent years this tradition has been enlivened by new approaches to bibliographical and textual issues, as well as new acquisitions by the HRC, under the directorship of Thomas Staley. Some of this work has placed an emphasis on sources, stressing that the study of pre-publication materials—notes, manuscript drafts, galleys, and page proofs, as well as authors’ correspondence and diaries—provides a tracery of an artist’s creative process. In Staley’s words, “by studying this process, scholars gain a deeper appreciation for the published work as well as an increased understanding of the trajectory of the artist's imagination.” Part of the Bibliography and Textual Studies interest group’s mission in the English Department is to expose students to this process.
BTS faculty practice across a range of historical fields and apply bibliographical scholarship to a wide variety of genres and texts. In addition to completing many editorial projects, BTS faculty publications include works on: manuscript textuality in medieval England; the structural transformation of print in late Elizabethan England; eighteenth-century print culture; graphic design in the early novel; the industrial book in America; medieval marginalia; and even the page-breaks in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The emergence of the internet, hypertext and other technologies has emphasized the continued relevance of textual studies as the discipline that analyzes and investigates the technical and social processes of the production, dissemination and reception of all types of text. Several of our faculty are currently working with hypermedia and digital textualities.
Students in this concentration may explore various kinds of texts (chiefly manuscript and printed, but also electronic texts, film, sound recording and others). Students learn not only about the editorial theory that applies to physical forms and versions of texts, but the technical, political and institutional aspects of their creation, transmission and control, as well as their perceived meanings and social effects.