Charles LaPorte (he/him/his)

I specialize in poetry and poetics, especially nineteenth-century anglophone poetry, as well as in the big messy sub-field called “religion and literature.”  I take a particular interest in the relationship between literary genre (e.g.. poetry, the novel, the essay, etc.) and cultural value.  My first book, Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, concerns the complicated relationship between Victorian poetry and contemporaneous Biblical interpretation.  My second book, The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare, explores religious responses to Shakespeare during the nineteenth century.  Generally speaking, my scholarship looks at why certain literary genres or sub-genres become valued over others, and under what conditions those genres and relative values evolve.