Weiner, Stephanie Kuduk

Associate Professor of English
English Department
860.685.3634

BA University of Minnesota Minneapolis
PHD Stanford University

EMAIL:

sweiner@wesleyan.edu

COURSES TAUGHT:

AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture
Romantic and Victorian Poetry
Aesthetics and Art History
British Culture and Politics
Poetry and Poetics

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

My research explores the ways in which debates about aesthetics circulate in both high and popular culture and intersect with ideas about politics, knowledge, and language. I view poetry and poetic form, and art and artistic technique more broadly, as important participants in these conversations, and in my research I try to explore and explain how. Stated most abstractly, my research involves the aesthetic life of ideas, the ways in which aesthetic forms make and shape meanings that exist in a dramatic tension with other discourses and epistemological arenas.

My current project involves how nineteenth-century English poets explored the relation between knowledge and sense experience. In particular, I've been interested most recently in the interaction between observed and described sounds on the one hand and linguistic sound patterning on the other, and my latest articles try to show how various poets sought to bring these two layers or aspects of sound together. I've also been writing a bit about the Romantic poet John Clare and the history of the material book, especially at the fin de siecle.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
--Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
--Listening with John Clare," forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism.
--"The Aesthetes' John Clare: Arthur Symons, Norman Gale, and Avant-Garde Poetics," English Literature in Transition (Fall 2008).
--"Knowledge and Sense Experience in Swinburne's Late Poetry," forthcoming in an edited collection.
--"Public and Private Occasion in 1820s Radical Poetry: Paine Commemorations and Davenport's Muse's Wreath," Nineteenth-Century Contexts (Dec. 2008).
--"Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson," Nineteenth-Century Literature 60: 4 (March 2006): 481-509.
--"Victorian Poetry as Victorian Studies," Victorian Poetry 41: 4 (Winter 2003): 513-18.
--"A Sword of a Song': Swinburne's Republican Aesthetics," Victorian Studies 43: 2 (Winter 2001): 253-79.
--"Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides," Victorian Poetry 39: 2 (Summer 2001): 165-86.