Wolfson, Susan J. 1948-

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WOLFSON, Susan J. 1948-

PERSONAL: Born 1948. Education: University of California, Berkeley, A.B., 1970, M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1978.

ADDRESSES: Home—64 Stony Brook Lane, Princeton, NJ 08544-7512. Offıce—Department of English, 222 McCosh Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1016; fax: 609-258-1607. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, assistant professor, 1978-84, chair of sophomore English, 1984-85, associate professor, 1984-90, chair of English honors program, 1984-86, 1987-88, professor, 1990-91, chair of graduate admissions, 1990-91; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, visiting fellow, 1988-89, 1989-90, professor of English, 1991—. University of California, Los Angeles, visiting fellow, 1986-87.

MEMBER: North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (advisory board member), Modern Language Association (division executive committee, 1988-92, chair, 1991), North East Modern Language Association (division committee, 1983, chair, 1984), Keats-Shelley Association of America, Byron Society, Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Berkeley Foundation, Wordsworth-Coleridge Association of America (president, 1985), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellow, 1970-71; Keats-Shelley Association, prize for distinguished essay, 1988, Distinguished Scholar Award, 2001; Rutgers University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, 1990; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, 1990; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1995-96; American Conference on Romanticism, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for outstanding book of 1997, for Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism.

WRITINGS:

The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1986.

(Author of introduction and coeditor with Barry V. Qualls) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Washington Square Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(Coeditor and preface with Peter J. Manning) Lord Byron: Selected Poems, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1996.

Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1997.

(Coeditor with Peter J. Manning) The Romantics and Their Contemporaries, Longman (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor) Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, and Reception Materials, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2000.

(Coeditor with Peter J. Manning) Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Penguin Classics (New York, NY), 2000.

(Editor) The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

(Coeditor with Elizabeth Fay) The Siege of Valencia, by Felicia Hemans: The 1823 Publication and the Manuscript, Broadview Press (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

(Editor) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Longman Publishers (New York, NY), 2002.

(Author of introduction and coeditor with Claudia L. Johnson) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Longman Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Cambridge History of Romanticism, edited by James Chandler, 2002; The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Esther Shore, 2002; Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1860, 2002; The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2002; Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyck, 2001; Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, edited by Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linking, 1999; The Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, edited by Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner, 1998, and A Companion to Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu, 1997. Contributor to journals, including PMLA, Wordsworth Circle, Modern Language Quarterly, Romanticism on the Net, European Romantic Review, Romantic Praxis, Studies in Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Life, and the Keats-Shelley Journal. Member of the editorial boards of the Keats-Shelley Journal, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Romanticism on the Net, and Wordsworth Circle.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Figures on the Margin: The Language of Gender in British Romanticism, for University of Pennsylvania Press; Selected Poetry of Walter Scott, for Penguin English Poetry.

SIDELIGHTS: Susan J. Wolfson has been a professor of English at Princeton University since 1991. She has written, edited, and contributed to many books and publications on the topic of the British Romantic era and its poetry.

In Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism Wolfson analyzes British poetry and six poets of the Romantic era. In her analysis Wolfson concentrates on formalism's cultural and historical aspects and its current relationship to British Romantic poetry. As Mark Kipperman noted, writing for Studies in Romanticism, "Susan Wolfson attempts to navigate these treacherous shoals and return formal study to the center of a sophisticated and historically sensitive analysis of romantic poems . . . calling, in effect, for a New Formalism." Notes and Queries contributor Chris Jones concluded, "Readers of all levels of expertise will benefit from these accomplished readings that restore to the poetry the subtle, self-situating irony which has most often been turned against it." In a review for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Theresa M. Kelley called Formal Charges a "well reasoned defense of formalist criticism" which "emphasizes the inner complexity of form as a medium of poetic agency." ANQ reviewer L. J. Swingle felt that "the primary value of Wolfson's book . . . is the precision and intensity of her focus on formal issues in the poetry."

Wolfson also edited a book about Felicia Hemans, a leading female poet in England and the United States during the Romantic era. Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, and Reception Materials contains five of her major works; letters written by Hemans that reveal her thoughts on her poetry and the poetry of others, information about her publishers, her celebrity status, and more; and letters written about Hemans by individuals, such as Lord Byron and Walter Scott. According to Wordsworth Circle reviewer Duncan Wu, "Wolfson has assembled in compact form the various materials that may be considered essential to a critical appreciation of her life and work." "Wolfson's edition is useful not only as a good introduction to Hemans's poetry, but also for charting the poet's particularly 'erratic reception history,'" noted Times Literary Supplement contributor Clare Pettitt, while Stephen C. Behrendt, in a review for Criticism, commented, "It is one of the great triumphs of Susan Wolfson's fine new edition that she enables us to see so clearly and with such an unencumbered view the work of one of the greatest of British Romantic poets. This edition sets—and then meets—high standards for textual editing, for circumspect biography, and for intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural sensitivity."