John Sitter
Notre Dame Professor of English
Specialty
Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature; poetry and poetics; satire, nature poetry, and ecological criticism
Degrees
A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Profile
John Sitter, formerly the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English at Emory University, is a specialist in eighteenth-century poetry and a teacher of poetry and satire from the Renaissance to the present. He is the author of Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England, Arguments of Augustan Wit and The Poetry of Pope's "Dunciad. His second book, Literary Loneliness, won the Louis Gottschalk Prize awarded by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and is widely regarded as an indispensable book in eighteenth-century studies. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry and two volumes of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Recent work includes an essay on William Collins and the chapter on poetry from 1740 to 1790 for the revised Cambridge History of English Literature. He is working on two books on eighteenth-century poetry, one for a general audience. Other current research interests include the question of poetry in education from the seventeenth century to the present.
Selected Publications
Arguments of Augustan Wit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.
The Poetry of Pope’s “Dunciad.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Sitter, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
———. Eighteenth-Century British Poets. 2 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990-91.
Contact Information
181 Decio Faculty Hall
(574) 631-7185
John.Sitter.1@nd.edu