English Department Faculty
Maia McAleavey
Associate Professor
Maia McAleavey
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S409
Telephone: 617-552-3728
Email: maia.mcaleavey@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Stanford University
- Ph.D., Harvard University
Research Interests
Nineteenth-century British literature and culture; the history of the novel; narrative analysis; and genre theory.
Biography
Maia McAleavey specializes in the history and form of the novel in English, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century British fiction. Her teaching and research attends closely to the formal features of narrative (plot, character systems, perspective, language) as well as to the cultural forces that shaped, and continue to shape, the perception and reception of those formal features.
Her current book project, "The Chronicle and the Narrative of the Group,” distinguishes a self-proclaimed genre of nineteenth-century writing, one that was often invoked in titles and authorial prefaces and that encompasses the writing of Walter Scott, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant, among many others. Although the chronicle has often been dismissed as unserious, its apparent formlessness offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel’s classically tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership.
Publications
Books
- The Chronicle and the Narrative of the Group (Current Book Project)
- The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, May 2015)
Articles
- “Charlotte M. Yonge and the Realist Tradition.” Charlotte M. Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age. Palgrave Macmillan. (forthcoming)
- “Anti-Individualism in the Victorian Family Chronicle.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 53.2 (August 2020): 213–234.
- “Behind the Victorian Novel: Scott’s Chronicles.” Victorian Studies 61.2. “Special Issue: Papers and Responses from the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association.” “Reading Outward,” Talia Schaffer, ed. Victorian Studies 61.2. (Winter 2019): 232-39.
- “Institutions” “Special Keywords Issue.” Rachel Ablow and Daniel Hack, eds. Victorian Literature and Culture. 46.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 742-745.
- “Inconvenient Husbands and Superfluous Wives.” “Special Issue: Extended Families.” Kelly Hager and Talia Schaffer, eds. Victorian Review. 32.2 (Fall 2013): 30-33.
- “The Plot of Bigamous Return,” Representations 123 (Summer 2013): 87-116.
- “The Discipline of Tears in The Old Curiosity Shop,” Dickens Studies Annual 42 (2011): 123-141.
- “Soul-mates: David Copperfield’s Angelic Bigamy,” Victorian Studies 52.2 (Winter 2010): 191-218. (Nominated by the editors of Victorian Studies for the Donald Gray Prize for the Best Essay Published in the Field of Victorian Studies.)
Reviews and Encyclopedia Entries
- “Bigamy.” The Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction, ed. Kevin Morrison (McFarland & Co., 2018).
- Review of Rebecca Rainof’s The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity, in Victorian Studies 59.3 (Spring 2017): 524-25.
- Review of Rae Greiner’s Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, in Wordsworth Circle 44.4 (Autumn 2013): 240-41.
- Review of Hilary Schor’s Curious Subjects: Women and the Trials of Realism, in Nineteenth-Century Literature 68.3 (Dec. 2013): 433-35.
- Review of Kelly Hager’s Dickens and the Rise of Divorce, in Journal of British Studies 50.2 (April 2011): 513-514.