Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair of Rhetoric and Critical Theory in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine.  She is the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), which won the Christian Gauss Prize and the MLA Prize for a First Book.  She is the editor of On Periodization:  Selected Essays from the English Institute (ACLS E-Book, 2010; Meredith McGill, series editor) and, with Yopie Prins, the co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014).  Her next book, Before Modernism: The Invention of American Poetry is forthcoming from Princeton UP.  Her essays in historical poetics have appeared in PMLA, MLQ, Victorian Poetry, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.  In her current project, she is thinking about versions of nineteenth-century America in the work of a few contemporary black poets in the US.  She is one of the founding members of the Historical Poetics working group.

 

Publications

  • “Lyric,” entry for the new edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman, eds. (Princeton University Press, 2012).
  • “Lyrical Studies” (with Yopie Prins), Victorian Literature and Culture 27:2 (Fall 1999). 521-530.
  • “Longfellow’s Tradition; or, Picture-Writing a Nation,” Modern Language Quarterly 59:4 (December 1998). 471-496.
  • “Poetry and Experience,” Raritan (Fall 2000), Vol. XX, Number 2., 126-135.
  • “Dickinson Undone,” Raritan (Spring, 2005), Vol. XXIV, Number 4, 128-148.
  • “The Poetess and Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets,”  (with Eliza Rickards) Poetess Archive Journal (April 2007), Vol. 1 No. 1
  • “Transatlantic Bryant,” Introduction, special issue of Victorian Poetry on American Victorian Poetry 43:2 (Summer 2005).
  • “Bryant’s Romanticism,” in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Trans-Atlantic Poetry, ed. Meredith McGill (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
  • “Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry,” in The Blackwell Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Mary Loeffelholz and Martha Nell Smith (Blackwell Publishing, 2008).
  • “The Story of Boon; or, Parables of the Poetess,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance (special issue on nineteenth-century American poetry, December, 2008).
  • “Who Reads Poetry?” in PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, January, 2008, 181-187.
  • Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading
  • “The Poet as Poetess,” for The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, ed. Kerry Larson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • “Longfellow in His Time,” Chapter 11 of the Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixon and Stephen Burt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • “American Victorian Poetry,” The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, ed. Felluga et al (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2015)
  • “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April, 2015
  • “The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics,” forthcoming in Critical Rhythm, ed. Jonathan Culler and Ben Glaser (Fordham UP)
  • “American Romanticism, Again,” Studies in Romanticism 57.1 (September 2016)
  • “Specters of the Ballad,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 70:2 (September 2016).
  • The Lyric Theory Reader
  • On Periodization