Judith Wilt
Newton College Alumnae Professor Emerita
Judith Wilt
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S454
Telephone: 617-552-3702
Email: judith.wilt@bc.edu
Education
- Duquesne University, BA
- Indiana University, Ph.D.
Department
Biography
Judith Wilt worked full time as a journalist during her college years at Duquesne University and holds a PhD in English from Indiana University. She taught at Princeton before coming to Boston College in 1978, where she was a founding member of the Women’s Studies Program, chair of the English Department in the 1990’s, and became the Newton College Alumnae Chair in Western Culture in 2002. She teaches and writes on nineteenth century British fiction, women writers, religion and literature, and popular culture genres, with a newer interest in Neo-Victorian studies.
She retired in 2011, teaches one course a year, and is currently secretary of the BC Association of Retired Faculty.
Publications
Books
- Women Writers and the Hero of Romance (Palgrave Macmillan; 2014)
- Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward , University of Virginia Press; 2005)
- Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct, University of Chicago Press; 1990)
- Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (University Of Chicago Press; 1985)
- Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence, Princeton University Press; 1980)
- The Readable People of George Meredith, Princeton University Press
Essays (selected)
- "Wuthering Heights" in the Twilight Universe" in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature: 134 (winter 2018), 274-88.
- “Cannibal and Transcendence Narratives in Les Miserables, Sweeney Todd, and Interview with the Vampire in The Journal of Neo-Victorian-Studies (online) 9:1 (2016), 74-97,
- “Reading the Arts in the Bronte Fiction,” in A Companion to the Brontes, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 453-470.
- “Ernest in Town and Jacques in the Country: Wildean Perspectives on A Tale of Two Cities in Dickens Quarterly 30:3 (June 2013), 123-30.
- “Unending: Acts of Retrieval in Pearl, Gilead, and The Year of Magical Thinking in Literature and Belief 31:1 (June 2011), 1-21.
- “Repositioning the Bodies: Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and other Monstrous Retellings,” in 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels since 2000. (Scarecrow Press, 2011), 72-83.
- “Bronte’s Shirley: Reflections on Marrying Moores,” in Victorian Literature and Culture 30:1 (March 2002), 1-19.
- “Down Here in Paradise: Toni Morrison’s Americas,” in Tracy Fessenden Ed., The Puritan Origins of American Sex (Routledge, 2000), 273-292.
- “The Romances of Ayn Rand,” in Mimi Gladstein and Chris M. Sciabarra Eds. Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (Penn State Univ. Press, 1999), 173-198.
- “God’s Spies: The Knower in Woolf’s The Waves,” in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92:2 (April 1993), 180-199.
- “He Would Come Back: The Fathers of Daughters in Daniel Deronda,” in Nineteenth Century Literature 42:3 (December 1987), 313-338.
- “The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic, and Science Fiction,” in The Journal of Popular Culture XIV:4 (1981), 618-28.
- “Notes on the Collision between Comedy and Feminism,” in Gender and Literary Voice: Women & Literature I, (1980), ed. Janet Todd, 173-196.
- “Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens’ Esther,” in Nineteenth Century Fiction 32:3 (December 1977), 285-309.
- “He Could Go No Farther: A Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa,” in PMLA 92 (January 1977), 19-32.
Recent Courses
Undergraduate
- EN 308 Detective Stories - Course syllabus
- ENGL 3003 Horror Stories - Course syllabus
- ENGL 3004 Storytelling and Catholicism - Course syllabus
- ENGL 2225 War Stories - Course syllabus
- ENGL 3324 Great Adaptations - Course syllabus
- ENGL 3010 Spy Stories - Course syllabus
Previous Courses
Undergraduate
- EN 354 - The Novels of Dickens - Course syllabus
- EN 481 - Woolf/Hemingway - Course syllabus
- EN 584 - Seminar: Science Fiction: Past Futures - Course syllabus
- EN 599 - Ayn Rand and Her Contemporaries: A Readings and Research Course
Graduate
- EN 827 - Master Narratives/Fielding to Lessing