Kathleen Blake

Activities and Interests

My main area of teaching and scholarship is 19th C. British literature and culture. I recently completed a book ms., Victorian Literature, Bentham, and Political Economy, which places literature in relation to economic theories and actualities of a capitalist, industrial, imperial age. In addition to economic themes, themes of nature increasingly fascinate me. Romantic nature poets spoke out of the same culture that produced Victorian industry, commerce, and colonialism. The interests I pursue in studying the 19th C. period in Britain have also led me to some teaching of texts of our own time, and nation. I teach postcolonial writers Narayan, Rushdie, and Naipaul. I also teach a course on literature of nature treating 20th -21st C. writings on the American West. Feminist concerns from previous work of mine like Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature continue to mark my teaching and scholarship. Among women writers I return most often to George Eliot. Among the range of authors I study I love to return to the subject of my first book, Lewis Carroll.