Areas of Interest

The epistemological grounds of fiction; European literature of the nineteenth century; the history of the novel especially in England; modern European drama; ancient and modern tragedy; German and English Romanticism; Victorian fiction; Victorian aesthetics; realism; symbolism; literary genres; the use of genres as narrative scaffolding; the use of ancient, medieval and Renaissance literature in the structures of modern narrative; the relation of myth and literature; the use of literary frames as epistemological structures; myth and literature in opera, especially Richard Wagner.

Select List of Publications

Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels (New York University Press, 1975).

The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot's Poetic Imagination (New York University Press, 1979).

"Middlemarch: The Genesis of Myth in the English Novel: The Relationship Between Literary Form and the Modern Predicament" (The Notre Dame English Journal: Special Session: A Symposium on Art: Kenneth Burke, M.H. Abrams, Felicia Bonaparte (Summer, 1981).

"George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Vico: The Shaping of a Modern Creed" (New Vico Studies, 1984).

The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell's Demon (The University Pres of Virginia, 1992)

Forthcoming

Written in Invisible Ink: The Metafictions of the Victorians

Works in Progress

The Aesthetics of Poesis: The Making of Victorian Fiction

The Book and the Ring: George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Richard Wagner's Ring of the Niebelungen