Edward Adams Professor of English

Payne 110
540-458-8764
adamse@wlu.edu

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