Caroline Levine, English, UW-Madison

Caroline Levine

Degrees and Institutions

PhD, University of London, 1996
AB, Princeton University, 1992

Research Interests

Victorian literature and culture, aesthetics and politics, narrative theory, historicism, formalism.

Selected Publications

Published books include Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Blackwell, Manifesto series, 2007); for a radio discussion of this book and the issues it raises, click here. And The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University of Virginia Press, 2003), winner of the 2004 Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies. I have also co-edited a volume called From Author to Text: Re-Reading George Eliot's Romola (Ashgate, 1998), and translated a French scholarly book, Nicole Loraux’s Children of Athena (Princeton University Press, 1993).

Other recent publications include an essay called “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies” (Victorian Studies, summer 2006); responses to this article by Carolyn Dever and Herbert F. Tucker may be found at the following: responses1 and responses2. A look at the newly invigorated relationship between Victorian studies and formalist reading has just appeared in the online journal Literature Compass (May 2007): it’s called “Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in Victorian Studies.” And “Propaganda for Democracy: The Curious Case of Love on the Dole” recently appeared in the Journal of British Studies. I have also co-edited an issue of The Journal of Popular Culture, called “The Gender of Popular Genres” (2002), and an issue of Women's Writing on George Eliot (1997), and I have written articles on Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, and Andreas Gursky.

Current Projects

I am currently at work on an article on HBO’s tv series The Wire. Called “Narrative Networks,” this essay brings together Dickens’s Bleak House with The Wire to make some claims about network theory and narrative theory. It ends with some methodological arguments about historicism and formalism. This piece is part of a larger project in which I seek to rethink formalism, with a particular attention to the ways that social hierarchies and institutions can be understood as forms. My article, “Strategic Formalism,” is an early version of this book-length argument. In a second project, I am co-editing a volume of essays with Mario Ortiz-Robles to be called Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century Novel. If anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, just about everyone who teaches the Victorian novel claims to have stayed awake at night, wondering how to get 6—or even 8—lectures out of Bleak House or Middlemarch. Most turn to the great mountain of historical information to fill the middle lectures. Cultural studies has been enormously valuable in this respect. But important though it is, contextual material may also mask some problems of specifically narrative interest: what exactly is the middle of the sprawling Victorian novel for? How does it work? And are we missing something important when we suggest to our classes that the world outside of the text was filled with excitement, while the novel simply bided its time, waiting to come to a proper and satisfying end? This collection of essays proposes to fill two crucial gaps in current scholarship: in terms of narrative theory, it seeks to address the missing middle; and in terms of Victorian studies, it aims to offer a set of models for thinking about the long middle of the novel.

Personal Statement

My long-term research goal is to develop new ways of understanding the intersections between aesthetics and politics, and both my published work and my teaching aim to bridge the gap between historical-political approaches to culture and the more traditional techniques of literary formalism.