Paul Stuewe Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of English

Dunton Hall 337
One College Circle
Poultney, VT 05764-1199
Email Address: stuewep@greenmtn.edu
802-287-8336; Fax: 802-287-8080

Dr. Paul Stuewe's autobiography-in-progress has the working title "'Books' Is My Middle Name," a sentiment that reflects his lifelong passion for printed words as well as his penchant for playing with their possibilities. A seminal moment in his career occurred in 1974 in Toronto, when he discovered that freelance writing and secondhand bookselling could be combined into a remarkably satisfying existence. This immersion in the world of books eventually led to his 1990 appointment as Editor of Books in Canada, a national literary review to which many eminent scholars contribute, and whose company he found both congenial and stimulating. Acquiring an M.A. through part-time study in 1993, he so enjoyed the teaching of two summer courses in "Detective Fiction" that he embarked on a full-time Ph.D. program in 1995, graduating in 2000. Various sessional teaching appointments and freelance writing assignments later, he took up his first full-time academic position at Green Mountain College in 2002 and has been delighted with the results.

Education
Ph.D., English, University of Waterloo, 2000.
M.A., English, University of Toronto, 1993.
B.A., Philosophy, Columbia University, 1965.

Research Interests
Long fascinated by late-Victorian print culture and its unprecedented mingling of aesthetes, journalists and all those in between, I find that I've become a kind of literary conservationist in arguing that once best-selling but now almost completely forgotten authors such as Grant Allen, Robert Barr and Sir Gilbert Parker should still be read. Having done precisely this in the course of researching my Ph.D. dissertation on the complex identities constructed by late 19th-century Canadian writers who returned to Great Britain to pursue literary careers, I was struck by how cavalier and wasteful we have become in dismissing such work as 'dated' and 'of merely historical interest' (two standard academic putdowns). As students of Defoe, Scott, Thackeray and Trollope are well aware, the need to earn a living with your pen results in a disconcerting number of potboilers amid the accomplished successes that are deemed worthy of literary canonization; there may be a higher proportion of chaff to wheat for authors such as Allen, Barr and Parker, but that simply means that they demand more dedicated and perspicacious readers.

Exploring this largely uncharted literary territory has generated several ongoing projects. Grant Allen, a best-selling novelist whose popular scientific and sociological writings were enormously influential, deserves a biography; this will ultimately require extensive archival research in Great Britain and North America, although compiling a bibliography and reading his more than 70 published books and thousands of pages of journalism is a more immediate and imminently achievable goal. Several of Robert Barr's fictions offer remarkably detailed descriptions of the material culture appropriate for British settlers coping with 19th-century Canadian realities, to the extent that they seem to constitute build-your-own-society instructions; my search for analogous texts has unearthed just enough similar material to keep me on the trail of what may - and the "may" should be emphasized - represent a significant literary phenomenon. More generally, my immersion in popular late-Victorian writing has convinced me that literary history's conventional account of the transition to Modernism, which emphasizes the enlightening experiences of a few literary geniuses (Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence), is seriously inadequate; intimations of Modernism's turn to irony, ambiguity and deep subjectivity are frequent in turn-of-the-century literary journalism, especially humorous writing, and I intend to pursue this insight to some sort of more focused conclusion.

Teaching
Images of Nature
Voices of Community
Creative Writing
Literary Research and Criticism
Shakespeare
British Literature to 1800
British Literature from 1800 to the Present
Modern Drama
Science Fiction
Masterworks of American Cinema
American Cinema 1967-1979
Utopias
Professional Communication
Introduction to Mass Communication

Selected Publications
Review of A Pour of Rain and Kindred of the Wild, Canadian Literature, Fall, 2005. http://www.canlit.ca/reviews-review.php?id=10931

Reviews of: "Detecting Texts" and "Lost Girls," Canadian Literature, Spring, 2004. http://www.canlit.ca/reviews-review.php?id=10691

Review of Censorship in Canadian Literature and The Dame in the Kimono, Canadian Literature, Summer, 2003. http://www.canlit.ca/reviews-review.php?id=10004

Entry on "Central and Southeastern European Drama" in Critical Survey of Drama (Pasadena: Salem Press, forthcoming)

Entries on "Ch'u Yüan," "Alfred and Harold Harmsworth," "Li Po," "Walter Pater" and "T'ao Ch'ien" in Dictionary of World Biography, ed. Frank McGill (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000)

Entries on "Andrei Belyi," "Michel Foucault," Stéphane Mallarmé" and "Ferdinand de Saussure" in Encyclopedia of Literary Critics and Criticism, ed. Chris Murray (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999)

"Better Read Than Dead" in From Reading to Writing, ed. Douglas H. Parker and Laurence Stevens (Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1999)
This Dark Embrace (Toronto: Mercury, 1996) Read a review of This Dark Embrace on Amazon.

Entries on "Canadian Popular Writing" and "Hugh Garner" in The Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literature in English (London: Routledge, 1994)

(with Hugh Garner) Don't Deal Five Deuces (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992)

"Robert Barr: An Appreciation and Some Bibliographical Additions," Canadian Notes and Queries, No. 44, Spring 1991.

The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner (Toronto: Lorimer, 1988)

Hugh Garner and His Works (Toronto: ECW Press, 1986)

Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Literature After Survival (Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1984)

"Thinking about Censorship" in Love or Money: The Politics of Culture, ed. David Helwig (Ottawa: Oberon, 1980)

Honors/Awards
1996-1999: Ontario Graduate Scholarship Recipient
1992: Books in Canada judged "Best Magazine of the Year" in its circulation category (up to 50,000) by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors
1990-present: Listed in Canadian Who's Who
1989-present: Listed in Contemporary Authors
1988: The Storms Below short-listed for City of Toronto Book Award; selected as one of the best 100 English-language books of the year by the Toronto Public Library; chosen as a "TheYear's Best" selection by the Ottawa Citizen.
1988-present: Listed in Who's Who in Canadian Literature
1987: Senior Arts Grant for Writing from the Canada Council
1980: Explorations Grant for Writing from the Canada Council