Edward Adams

Adams teaches courses such as Victorian poetry, Hitchcock and 19th century British novel. His research interests include history and fiction, novel and epic, and high culture and pop culture.

Edward Adams

Edward Adams

John Lucian Smith, Jr. Professor of English

Education

  • B.A., Amherst College
  • M.A. in Classics, University of California, Berkeley
  • Ph.D., Yale University

Research

  • History and fiction
  • Novel and epic
  • High culture and popular culture

Teaching

  • WRIT 100-First Year Writing Seminar: Films of Kubrick
  • English 232-The Novel
  • English 341-Romantic Poetry and Prose
  • English 345-Studies in the 19th-Century British Novel
  • English 347-Victorian Prose: History and Self in the 19th C.
  • English 348-Victorian Poetry

Seminar and Capstone Topics

  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Walter Scott
  • Byron
  • Epic from Homer to Spielberg
  • Adaptation and its Discontents
  • Comfort Fiction

Selected Publications

Book

  • Liberal Epic: the Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill (University Press of Virginia, 2011). Winner of the ISSN 2012 Perkins Prize for the Best Work on Narrative Literature (International Society for the Study of Narrative).

Essays

  • "Macaulay’s History of England and the Dilemmas of Liberal Epic.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 33/2 (Fall 2006).

  • "Epic and Novel." The Encyclopedia of the Novel, v. 1, ed. Paul Schellinger (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998): 381-4.

Work in Progress

  • The School of Gibbon: Epic History and the Age of the Novel