Associate Professor of English
Dunton Hall 337
One Brennan Circle
Poultney, VT 05764-1199
Email Address: stuewep@greenmtn.edu
802-287-8336; Fax: 802-287-8080
"Show me your bookshelves and
I will tell you who you are."
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.
Courses Taught
Images of Nature
Voices of Community
Creative Writing
Literary Research and Criticism
Shakespeare
The Metaphysics of Hardboiled Fiction
Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Hesse
Mothers of the Novel
The Western Film
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
Books
Editor, The Seats of the Mighty, Sir Gilbert Parker (Shelburne, ON: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007)
This Dark Embrace (Stratford: Mercury, 1996), novel
Don't Deal Five Deuces (Toronto: Stoddart, 1992), novel (with Hugh Garner)
The Storms Below: The Turbulent Life and Times of Hugh Garner (Toronto: Lorimer, 1988), biography
Hugh Garner and His Works (Toronto: ECW Press, 1986), critical study
Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Literature after Survival (Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1984), critical study
Contributions to Books
Article on "Film in Canada (1990’s)" in The Nineties in America (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2009)
Rev. of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Brody in Magill’s Literary Annual 2009 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2009)
Rev. of Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories in History and the Arts, Clive James, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2008 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2008)
Rev. of Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, Viktor Skhlovsky, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2007 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2007)
Rev. of The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, Roland Barthes, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2006 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2006)
Rev. of Untold Stories, Alan Bennett, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2006 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2005)
Rev. of John Clare: A Biography, Jonathan Bate, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2004 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2004)
Rev. of Kiln People, David Brin, and Loving Monsters, James Hamilton-Patterson, in Magill’s Literary Annual 2003 (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2003)
Entry on "Central and Southeastern European Drama" in Cyclopedia of World Drama (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2003)
Entries on "Ch’u Yüan," "Alfred and Harold Harmsworth," "Li Po," "Walter Pater" and "T’ao Ch’ien"; in Dictionary of Literary 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)
Entries on "Canadian Popular Writing" and "Hugh Garner" in The Encyclopedia of Post- Colonial Literature in English (London: Routledge, 1994)
"Hugh Garner" in ECW's Biographical Guide to Canadian Novelists (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993)
"Selected Discographies" in Some Day Soon: Essays on Canadian Songwriters, Douglas Fetherling (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1991)
Essays on "D.M. Thomas" and "Evelyn Waugh" in Popular Fiction in America (Washington, D.C.: Beacham Publishing, 1987)
Essays on "Venusberg" (Anthony Powell), "The Siege of Krishnapur" (J.G. Farrell), "Confederates" (Thomas Keneally) and "The Sword of Honour Trilogy" (Evelyn Waugh) in Masterplots II (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1987)
"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 "The Year'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
