Lawlor, Clark 1965-

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Lawlor, Clark 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born May 28, 1965. Education: St Anne's College, University of Oxford, M.A. (honors); University of Warwick, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—English Division School of Arts & Social Sciences, Lipman Bldg., Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and writer. Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, reader in English and director of the Northumbria Academy of English Language and Literature.

WRITINGS:

Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including The European Spectator, Volume 6, edited by Allan Ingram and Elisabeth Detis, Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier, France), 2003; Literature and Science 1660-1834, Volume 2, Judith Hawley, general editor, Pickering & Chatto (London, England), 2003; Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2006; and Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy": A Casebook, Casebooks in Criticism Series, edited by Thomas Keymer, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Notes and Queries, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. Also editor for online publications, including general editor of Chadwyck Healey's Literature Online, 1999-2000, and joint commissioning editor for Romantic critical biographies for the same online site, 1999—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Clark Lawlor is an English professor whose primary interests are the "Long Eighteenth Century" (1660-1832), Anglo-American literature, and literature and medicine. An initial area of interest for Lawlor was the topic of the grotesque body in literature. He has since developed an interest in the representations of disease in British and American literature and the relationships between literature and medicine in general. He has contributed to books and professional journals, especially concerning the role of disease in various writings, such as Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In his book Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, Lawlor explores why consumption—a deadly disease that results in the wasting of the body, especially from pulmonary tuberculosis—was made into such a "Romantic" illness by writers such as Sterne, William Shakespeare, John Keats, and others. In his examination, the author presents his case that literature plays a primary role in the public's perception of a disease. Noting that Consumption and Literature "provides much more than the title promises," Choice contributor A.E. McKim went on to write in the same review that the book "is a finely balanced exploration of historical and literary conceptions of consumption."