Nancy Glazener
Associate Professor of English
412-624-4282
glazener@pitt.edu
CL 501-L
Nancy Glazener’s scholarship and teaching focus on 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century U.S. literature, especially fiction. Her book Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910, was published in 1997 by Duke University Press in the New Americanists series.
Professor Glazener’s interests include ethics, print culture, gender studies, reception theory, the institutional history of literary studies, and the history of versions of personhood. She is a Contributing Editor of American Literary History. Her most recent literary project is “The Novel in Postbellum Print Culture,” an essay scheduled to appear in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Clare Eby and Benjamin Reiss, Cambridge UP. Her recent publications include
- "The Novel, The Social, and the Event: An International Ethical Encounter," in Textual Ethos Studies, or Locating Ethics, ed. Anna Fähraeus and AnnKatrin Jonsson (Amsterdam and NY: Rodopi Press, 2005) 35-52.
- "The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism," in A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914, ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 15-34.
- “Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet,” American Literary History 19 (Summer 2007) 2: 329-349.
- “Benjamin Franklin and the Limits of Secular Civil Society,” American Literature 80 (June 2008) 2: 203-232.
Glazener’s current book project, “A Critical History of Ethics and U. S. Fiction: The Long Nineteenth Century,” maps the ethical terrain of American fiction-writing and fiction-reading between the 1790s and 1900. This interdisciplinary study examines some of the separations and interchanges between ethics, as it was envisioned to operate in novels, and psychology, law, economics, politics, and religious traditions. Novels were shaped in some respects by the intellectual and cultural division of labor that distinguished ethics from these other domains. However, many novels also bypassed these disciplinary boundaries, bringing together ways of knowing the world and responding to the world that challenged conventional understandings of ethics. This study sets out to trace the pressure of dominant ethical conceptions as well as a host of emergent ethical possibilities that flickered in works of nineteenth-century U. S. fiction.
