Troy Boone
Associate Professor of English and
Director of Graduate Studies
412-624-6549
boone@pitt.edu
CL 526
Troy Boone is the Director of Graduate Studies. His research and teaching focus primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture, particularly imperialist writings and youth culture.
His first book, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2005), examines the representation of English working-class children - the youthful inhabitants of the poor urban neighborhoods that a number of writers dubbed "darkest England"-in Victorian and Edwardian imperialist literature. The book focuses on how such writings, for child and adult audiences, undertook an ideological project to enlist working-class children in the British imperial enterprise; Youth of Darkest England in turn examines how working-class young people resisted this nationalist identification process that tended to eradicate or obfuscate class differences.
Troy Boone has also published articles on such topics as Joseph Conrad and the Titanic disaster; the Marquis de Sade and romantic-era discourses on sexuality; Daniel Defoe and the origins of gothic fiction; Bram Stoker and fin de siecle decadence; Bernard Shaw and the Salvation Army; Kenneth Grahame, Edith Nesbit, and machine culture; Mark Twain's detective fictions, Girl Scout handbooks, and the Nancy Drew mysteries.
Teaching
Recent graduate courses
- Topics in Nineteenth-Century Culture: Savagery and Civilization
- Imperialism and Modernity
- Young Britain: Nation, Class, and Youth
- Institutions of Literature: Poesis
Frequently taught undergraduate courses
- Senior Seminar (recent topics: the lyric; Joseph Conrad)
- Critical Approaches to Children's Literature
- The Modernist Tradition
- The Gothic Imagination
- Children and Culture
- Introduction to Critical Reading
