Chris R. Vanden Bossche
Professor
Specialty
Victorian Literature
Degrees
B.A., University of Notre Dame; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
Profile
Chris R. Vanden Bossche specializes in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose. He is the currently working on a book concerned with Victorian conceptions of agency and the role of the novel as an agent of social reform, entitled "Reform Acts: Agency, the Franchise, and the Novel, 1832-1867." His essays have dealt with family and class as represented in cookery books and David Copperfield, separate spheres and social reform in Ruskin, the idea of authorship in the copyright debates of 1837-1842, and "coming of age" in Victorian literature and culture. In addition, he has published essays on Tennyson, Scott, and other nineteenth-century subjects. He is also the author of a study of the intersections of political and literary authority, Carlyle and the Search for Authority, and editor of Thomas Carlyle's Historical Essays and Past and Present.
Selected Publications
Carlyle and the Search for Authority. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991.
Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. Edited by Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Joel J. Brattin, and D. J. Trela. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
"What Did Jane Eyre Do? Ideology, Agency, Class and the Novel." Narrative 13 (2005): 46-66.
"Class Discourse and Popular Agency in Bleak House." Victorian Studies 47 (2004): 7-31.
Contact Information
211 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-7479
cvandenb@nd.edu
http://www.nd.edu/~cvandenb