Fraistat, Neil (Richard) 1952-

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FRAISTAT, Neil (Richard) 1952-

PERSONAL: Surname is pronounced "Fry-stat"; born April 19, 1952, in New York, NY; son of Louis (a watchmaker) and Shirley (a homemaker; maiden name, Putterman) Fraistat; married Rose Ann Cleveland (a writer), July 28, 1979; children: Shawn Cleveland. Education: University of Connecticut, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1974; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1976, Ph.D. (English), 1979.

ADDRESSES: Home—8413 Potomac Ave., College Park, MD 20740. Office—Department of English, University of Maryland—College Park, College Park, MD 20742; fax: 301-314-7539. E-mail—[email protected]. edu.

CAREER: University of Maryland—College Park, assistant professor, 1979-84, associate professor, 1984-91, professor of English, 1991—. Chair of advisory board, Maryland Institute of Technology and the Humanities, 1999—; member of advisory board, Brown University's Women Writers Project, 2001—.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America (member, executive committee for bibliography and textual studies, 2000-05), Keats-Shelley Society, Milton Society, Washington Area Romanticists' Group (cofounder; cochair, 1983—), Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellowships from Huntington Library, 1981, and American Council of Learned Societies, 1982; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1990-91, grants, 1992-94, 1994-97, 1998-2000, 2001, 2004; Keats-Shelley, Association Prize, 1994, Distinguished Scholar Award, 2001; Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, 1993-94; Pforzheimer Foundation grant, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1985.

(Editor) Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1986.

(Editor) Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Prometheus Un-bound Notebooks (facsimile edition), Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor, with Donald H. Reiman, and contributor of commentary) The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume 1, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2000.

(Editor, with Susan S. Lanser) Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England, Broadview Press (Orchard Park, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Donald H. Reiman) Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, 2nd edition, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with Elizabeth B. Loizeaux) Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2002.

Contributor of articles and reviews to professional journals, including Keats-Shelley Journal, Studies in Romanticism, PMLA, Wordsworth Circle, and Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography. Member of editorial board, Romanticism, 1993—, Studies in Romanticism, 1995—, and Keats-Shelley Journal, 1996—.

SIDELIGHTS: In The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry, Neil Fraistat studies poetry collections by Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, correcting the "critical neglect of the expressive use poets have made of the collection," according to Times Literary Supplement reviewer Mark Casserley. To Fraistat, Casserley suggested, the "ideal Romantic volume … exhibits Coleridge's 'unity in multeity'; it is an open and diverse form, but aspires to the epic qualities of the long poem." In this analysis even poems considered minor gain importance from their context. Concluded Casserley, Fraistat "offers persuasive justification for the view that these collections represent 'achievements that few poetic volumes of any era have equalled.'"

Fraistat once told CA: "My main goal as a scholar and a teacher is to explore the social roles of literature and the arts."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Journal of Modern Literature, fall-winter, 1988, Susan A. Stewart, review of Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, p. 255.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, June, 2001, Steven E. Jones, review of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume 1, p. 260.

Review of English Studies, August, 1986.

Studies in Romanticism, summer, 2001, Morton D. Paley, review of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, p. 300.

Times Literary Supplement, November 8, 1985, Mark Casserley, review of The Poem and the Book: Interpreting Collections of Romantic Poetry; August 3, 2001, Michael O'Neill, review of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, p. 22.