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Associate Professor of English
Ph.D., Cornell University
203 Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Andrew.McCann@Dartmouth.EDU
Interests
I work primarily on nineteenth-century British literature, Romantic and Victorian, though much of my research is concerned with the ways in which colonial print-cultures adapt this material. My most recent research traces the relationship between evolutionary anthropology and aesthetic experience, both in Britain and the settler-colonies of nineteenth-century Australia. It focuses in particular on the visions of extinction that appear in the popular fiction of empire. I also have an ongoing interest in critical theory and its ability to engage with contemporary political contexts and creative practices.
Courses
English 36 Victorian Literature and Culture, 1837-1859 (05F)
This course examines early Victorian poetry, prose and fiction in the context of cultural practices and social institutions of the time. We will locate cultural concerns among, for example, those of capitalism, political reform, scientific knowledge, nation and empire. And we will consider revisions of space, time, gender, sexuality, class, and public and private life that characterized formations of British identity during this period. Texts may include work by Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, John Ruskin, Charles Darwin. We will also read selections from recent criticism of Victorian culture. Course Group II, CA tag Cultural Studies and Popular Studies
English 34 Romantic Literature: Writing and English Society, 1780-1832 (06S)
This course offers a critical introduction to the literature produced in Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. There will be a strong emphasis throughout the course on the specific ways in which historical forces and social changes shape and are at times shaped by the formal features of literary texts. The question of whether romantic writing represents an active engagement with or an escapist idealization of the important historical developments in this period will be a continuous focus. Readings include works by Blake, Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Keats, and Clare. Course Group II, CA tag National Traditions and Countertraditions.
Selected Publications
-Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2004
-Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere, London, Macmillan Press, 1999
-"Unknown Australia: Rosa Praed's Vanished Race," Australian Literary Studies 22.1 (May 2005): 37-50
-"The Savage Metropolis: Animism, Aesthetics and the Pleasures of a Vanished Race," Textual Practice 17.2 (2003): 317-333.
-"Humanism After Auschwitz: Reflections on Jean Améry's Freitod," Angelaki 6.3 (December 2001): 71-81.
-"Romantic Self-Fashioning: John Thelwall and the Science of Elocution," Studies in Romanticism 40.2 (Summer 2001): 215-232.
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