Rosemary Jann

Rosemary Jann

Rosemary Jann

Emeritus Faculty

nineteenth-century British literature, history of science, interdisciplinary and cultural studies

Rosemary Jann holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her main area of expertise is nineteenth-century England, and she teaches a range of Victorian prose, poetry, and fiction, in addition to various courses in literary analysis and research methods required of undergraduate and graduate students. As a scholar, her first book (The Art and Science of Victorian History, 1985) examined Victorian historical writing for the ways its literary strategies enabled historians to negotiate the intellectual and moral dilemmas characteristic of their age. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order , published in 1995, is aimed at teaching a student audience how to read popular literature for its ideological as well as literary messages concerning class and gender. She has recently edited an edition of Edwin Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions for the Oxford World Classics series. Her current work concerns the ways in which different groups portrayed themselves and rival classes in order to advance their own claims for status in the period 1880-1915.

Selected Publications

"Breeding, Education, and Vulgarity: George Gissing and the Lower-Middle Classes." Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture. Ed. Susan Bernstein and Elsie Michie. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

(ed.) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

"Hardy's Rustics and the Construction of Class." Victorian Literature and Culture 28.2 (2000): 411-25.

"Eliza Burt Gamble: Revising the Descent of Woman." Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe. Ed. Barbara Gates and Ann Shteir. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. 147-63.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order. New York: Twayne, 1995.

"Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its Discontents." Victorian Studies 37.2 (1994): 287-306. (Repr. in Sexualities in Victorian Britain. Ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. 79-95.)

The Art and Science of Victorian History. Columbus: Ohio UP, 1985.

Courses Taught

ENGL 408: British Literature 1880-1915

ENGL 453: Nineteenth-Century English Novel

ENGL 459: Narration and Point of View

ENGL 640: Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature

ENGL 640: Victorian Novel and the Social World

ENGL 701: Research in English Studies

ENGL 705: Literary Theory and Criticism