"The Future of the Romantic Book: Readers with Scissors"

The McGill University Department of English Visiting Speaker Series presents a lecture by Deidre Shauna Lynch

Deidre Shauna Lynch is Chancellor Jackman Professor and an associate professor of English, as well as affiliate faculty with the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture, at the University of Toronto. Lynch has published widely on the literature and culture of eighteenth-century and romantic-period Britain, on the history of women’s writing, on the theory and history of the novel, on the history of reading, and on Enlightenment dialogues between fiction and moral philosophy. Her book The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book in 1999. Other books include (as editor or co-editor) Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Duke University Press), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton University Press), the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the Romantic Period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Her edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park will be published by Harvard University Press in 2014. She is currently completing At Home in English: A Cultural History of the Love of Literature, a book-length study that engages the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prehistory of English studies in order to give a new account of the state of the discipline and of the state of our literary affections. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association).