Selected Publications
- Kleine artige Kupfer: Buchillustration im 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018).
- The Publishing and Marketing of Illustrated Literature in Scotland, 1760-1825 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2017).
- Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’, Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730-1842 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015).
- The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2009).
- David Mallet, Anglo-Scot: Poetry, Patronage and Politics in the Age of Union (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008).
FRIAS Project
Transnational Literary History, Eighteenth-Century Book Illustration, and the Genre of the robinsonade
Contributing to the transnational mapping of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the genre of the robinsonade, the project aims to recover the significance of the book illustrations and other paratexts (especially translators’ or authors’ prefaces) that accompanied the project corpus of 172 editions of 18th-century robinsonades published in English, French, Italian, and German. It will include translations of Robinson Crusoe and other robinsonades, and aim to produce an account of the European history of the robinsonade that draws on book-historical analysis and reception studies in order to establish that the genre was defined not only by the novels themselves but also by their illustrations. Methodologically, the project combines the systematic, diachronic study of hitherto unstudied 18th-century literary book illustrations with the transnational examination of a pervasive literary genre the most prominent example of which—despite being recognised as an example of world literature—has still not been comprehensively mapped in terms of its transnational iterations and impact. It is ground-breaking in its use of book illustrations as part of genre theorization, especially as it advocates that 18th-century reading experience was affected as much by readers’ visual literacy and by recall of intertextually associated illustrations as by the reading of the typographic text itself