Chris R. Vanden Bossche
Professor
Director, Undergraduate Studies
in English
Specialty : Victorian Literature
Degrees: B.A., University of Notre Dame; Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz
Chris R. Vanden Bossche specializes in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose. He is the currently completing 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 Recent Publications
- “Chartism, Class Discourse, and the Captain of Industry: Social Agency in Chartism and Past and Present.” Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reassessing Carlyle for our Times. Ed. Paul Kerry and Marylu Hill. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. 30-48.
- 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 / 356 O'Shaughnessy Hall
(574) 631-7479 / (574) 631-7226
cvandenb@nd.edu
http://www.nd.edu/~cvandenb
Postal address
Department of English
356 O’Shaughnessy
Notre Dame, IN 46556
