Stoneley, Peter

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Stoneley, Peter

PERSONAL:

Education: Graduated from the University of Wales and the University of Oxford.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of English and American Literature, University of Reading, Whiteknights, P.O. Box 217, Reading, Berkshire RG6 6AH, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and educator. University of Reading, Reading, England, School of English and American Literature, professor, 2004—. Former reader at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

WRITINGS:

Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860-1940, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

A Queer History of the Ballet, Routledge (New York, NY), 2006.

(Editor, with Cindy Weinstein) The Blackwell Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950, Blackwell Publishing (Malden, MA), 2007.

(Editor, introduction and notes) Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Peter Stoneley was educated at the University of Wales and the University of Oxford. Following his graduation, he held a readership at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, before settling in 2004 at the University of Reading in England as a professor in the School of English and American Literature. Stoneley's primary area of research and academic interest is the American literary culture from the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the works of Mark Twain, as well as the relationship between the literature of the period and young, female readers of the day. Stoneley has written and/or edited a number of books, including Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic, Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860-1940, A Queer History of the Ballet, The Blackwell Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950, which he edited jointly with Cindy Weinstein, and an edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he not only edited but provided with an introduction and notes.

In Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic, Stoneley analyzes the works of Mark Twain with an eye toward the author's relationships with and attitudes toward women, and how they are reflected in the way he depicted his female characters. He looks at the ways in which certain of Twain's works have a decidedly masculine aura, most particularly those with Western settings or having to do with the Mississippi, such as Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi. At the same time, Twain also wrote books that appeared to take the sensibilities of his wife and daughters into account by addressing themes more frequently linked to female readers, such as idealism and sentiment, as reflected in works such as The Prince and the Pauper. The ideology of the day as to what were considered feminine or masculine traits and behavior is reflected through most of Twain's work, however it is also notable that his female characters in particular reflect no sexual persona, but instead are generally sex-less adolescents or mature women past their prime. Hamlin Hill, reviewing the book for the Mississippi Quarterly, noted that Stoneley appears to have ignored the more recent work that predates his own and addresses this topic, as he fails to comment on their findings. However, he concluded that, given the complexity of the subject, "Stoneley makes his way into the maze, and he has been ingenious and provocative in his use of little-known and critically marginal texts."

Consumerism and American Girls' Literature, 1860-1940 looks at the most popular works written during that period with girls as their intended audience, and suggests that these books had a specific purpose. Stoneley proposes that many of these works were geared toward warning girls of the dangers of consumerism, and that the rise of the middle class made for a group of girls more likely to take the time to read these warnings. Daniel Opler, writing for Cercles, found the book to be an "impressive if somewhat flawed study." Opler concluded: "Stoneley's arguments and insights are unquestionably important, and the work as a whole is highly admirable in many respects."